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THE NEW TENNYSON STATUE, LINCOLN CATHEDRA 



THROUGH ENGLAND 
WITH TENNYSON 

A PILGRIMAGE TO PLACES ASSOCIATED 
WITH THE GREAT LAUREATE 

BY 

OLIVER HUCKEL 



ILLUSTRATED 



NEW YORK 
THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY 

PUBLISHERS 



7K5^«4 



Copyright, 1913, 
By THOMAS Y. CROWELL COMPANY. 



Published September, 191S. 



©CI.A354738 



DEDICATED, BY PERMISSION, TO 

LORD AND LADY TENNYSON 

OF FARRINGFORD AND ALDWORTH 

IN REMEMBRANCE OF THEIR KINDNESS 
AND GRACIOUS HOSPITALITY 



PREFACE 

NOT a motley company, like the Canter- 
bury pilgrims of old, — the Wife of 
Bath, the Pardoner, the Nun, the Monk 
and the others, but merely the pilgrim Lady, 
who was to be the finer interpreter and spirit- 
ual atmosphere of the journey; the two pil- 
grim Laddies, — the Tall Laddie and the Wee 
Laddie, — through whose eyes we are to see the 
eternal childlike in England (perchance by the 
Lady we are to see the eternal feminine in all 
things ) : and last, and least, the pilgrim Par- 
son, who writes the chronicle of the high quest 
upon which we have set out. 

And 'tis not, like the Canterbury Pilgrims, 
a quest to the tomb of Thomas a Becket at 
Canterbury, but merely a devout visitation to 
the shrines of Alfred Tennyson the poet. He 
had meant so much to us personally for years, 
— even the Laddies love his poems and sing 
some of them, — and he is so universally 
beloved in all America, and such a noble 



PREFACE 

representative of English literature at its 
worthiest, that it is a pilgrimage of love that 
we make. Yea, such a splendid spiritual in- 
terpreter is he in "In Memoriam," "The Two 
Voices," "The Higher Pantheism," and the 
glorious legends of the "Idylls of the King," 
that we feel that it is also a pilgrimage of 
grace upon which we have set out, a sort of 
quest of the Holy Grail. This summer jour- 
neying to the haunts and homes of the royal 
laureate we hoped would be a benediction and 
a consecration. The Lady prophesied it ; even 
the Laddies were glowing with the glad an- 
ticipation of great things, commingled with 
boyish dreams of plenty of fun in Merrie 
England. 

Just how it all worked out, the actual reali- 
zation exceeding even our expectations, this 
chronicle is to tell. It is a record of things 
actually done. It might have been more elab- 
orately wrought out, each place might have 
been more exhaustively treated. But such as 
it is, it is the story of three months among 
Lincolnshire hedgerows, Devonshire lanes, 
Cornish cliffs, with an incursion now and then 
into the more populous places of men in cities. 
At many points we lived in a leisurely way, 

vi 



PREFACE 

keeping house for ourselves and getting inti- 
mate glimpses into the lives of the people. 
Everywhere we carried our well-thumbed vol- 
ume of Tennyson with us, and read the poems 
aloud on the sunny lawns, or by the wind- 
swept cliffs, where they were composed. Ten- 
nyson was our one constant comrade, during 
the whole summer, and we can testify that 
life and nature and England grew more great 
and beautiful under the mystic spell of his 
verse. We also think that we learned much 
concerning the man and his moods, and the 
inner meaning of some of his great lines, by 
the new interpretation that the places lent to 
the poems. Clearer than ever became the 
great Goethe's words: 

Wer den Dichter will verstehen 
Muss in Dichters Lande gehen — 

which I think we may translate, 

"Would you the poet understand? 
The secret's in the poet's land." 

Oliver Huckel. 

Baltimore, 

September, 1913. 



vn 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGB 

I. Lincoln and the Lincolnshire Fens ... 1 

IL SoMERSBY, THE PoET's BiRTHPLACE ... 15 

in. Louth and the Old Grammar School . . 40 

IV. Cambridge, and College Days 51 

V. Tennyson's London 62 

VI. Shiplake and the Wedding Day . . .76 

VII. Clevedon, the Shrine of Arthur Hallam . 89 

VIII. Hawarden, the Home of a Lifelong Friend 101 

IX. Farringford and the Isle of Wight . .111 

X. Aldworth among the Surrey Hills . . 142 

XI. TiNTAGEL AND KiNG ArTHUR l63 

XII. Amesbury Abbey and Queen Guinevere . . 176 

XIII. Camelot and Lyonesse 187 

XIV. Winchester and King Arthur's Round Table 200 
XV. Glastonbury Abbey and the Isle of Avalon 219 

Postscript 241 

Index 245 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

The New Tennyson Statue, Lincoln Cathedral 

Frontispiece 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

Map of the Tennyson Country 1' 

Tennyson's Birthplace, Somersby 20 

Somersby Grange 28 

The Brook and Bridge, Somersby 28 

Somersby Church 36' 

King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth . . . 46 

Eastgate, Louth 46 

Master's Court, Trinity College, Cambridge . . . 52" 

The Backs, Cambridge 58"^ 

Portrait of Tennyson in 1859, by Watts, owned by 

Lady Henry Somerset 70 

Bolney Court, Shiplake 78*^ 

Shiplake Church 78"^ 

Portrait of Mrs. Tennyson, by Watts 84 "^ 

Clevedon Court 94 

Coleridge's Cottage, Clevedon 94 

The Old Church, Clevedon 98 

Interior of Clevedon Church 98 

Hawarden Castle 106' 

Alum Bay, Isle of Wight 118'^ 

xi 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

Farringford, Tennyson's Home at Freshwater. . 126 

Tennyson's Lane, Farringford 132 

The Tennyson Beacon 138 

Aldworth 146 

Portrait of Tennyson by Samuel Laurence . . .150 
Latest Portrait of Tennyson, by Watts . . . .154 

Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 162 

Through the Postern Gate, Tintagel 168' 

The Castle Arch, Tintagel 172 

The Church, Amesbury 178 

Land's End, looking off to Lyonesse 188 

Perranporth Arch and Chapel Rocks 192' 

Dozemary Pool 196 

Winchester Cathedral 204 

Westgate, Winchester 204 

Great Hall of the Castle, and the Round Table .210 

The Tor, Glastonbury 220' 

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey 226 

The Abbot's Kitchen, Glastonbury 236 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

OPPOSITE PAGE 

Farringford, Tennyson's Home at Freshwater, . 126 

Tennyson's Lane, Farringford 132' 

The Tennyson Beacon 138 

Aldworth 146 

Portrait of Tennyson by Samuel Laurence . . .150 
Latest Portrait of Tennyson, by Watts . . . .154 

Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey 162 

Through the Postern Gate, Tintagel 168' 

The Castle Arch, Tintagel 172 

The Church, Amesbury 178 

Land's End, looking off to Lyonesse 188 

Perranporth Arch and Chapel Rocks 192' 

Dozemary Pool ig6 

Winchester Cathedral 204 

Westgate, Winchester 204 

Great Hall of the Castle, and the Round Table . 210' 

The Tor, Glastonbury 220' 

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey 226' 

The Abbot's Kitchen, Glastonbury 236 





-i\ IRISH SEA 



w 



Shiplake 

trievedon 

Glastonbury Abbey Aldworth 

Amcsburv Abbey ^p, , . 

y ' J /Winchester 




Lyonesse 



[ r P 



Through England with 
Tennyson 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

IT was a glorious afternoon when we came 
riding into the ancient city of Lincoln, 
and saw in the sunset light the great 
cathedral, triple-towered, enthroned upon the 
heights above the dwarfish houses of the town. 
Tennyson was always impressed by the 
grandeur of this cathedral, its vastness and 
its mystery. He often writes of cathedrals 
in his poems, — of the "gray cathedral towers," 
and of the "windy clanging of the minster 
clock," and doubtless often had in mind his 
boyhood memory of this majestic fane. So 
beautiful are its perfect and lofty proportions 
that it seemed to him as "the towers of Ilion, 
which rose like a mist of music while Apollo 
sang." 

We were delighted to find a noble statue of 
1 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Tennyson in the cathedral close at Lincoln, 
under the very shadow of the mighty minster. 
We had not known that such a statue was 
there, and at a distance as we came toward it, 
it seemed like a monument to Sir Walter 
Scott and his dog. But we asked ourselves, 
Why should Sir Walter have a place here? 
As we drew nearer, we saw that it was Ten- 
nyson with his hound. "But what is it that 
he has in his hand?" queried the Lady, "and 
why is it that he stands in such a meditative 
attitude with bowed head?" "It is a bird he 
holds, — a dead bird," said one of the Laddies. 
But as we approached still nearer, it flashed 
upon us. What he held in his hand was "the 
flower from the crannied wall," and he was 
meditating upon it : 

"Flower in the crannied wall, 
I pluck you out of the crannies, 
I hold you here root and all in my hand. 
Little flower — but if I could understand 
What you are, root and all, and all in all, 
I should know what God and man is." 

It is singularly appropriate that this lofty 
and profound thought should be thus sym- 
bolized in the shadow of the great cathedral. 
For the poem went to the heart of things, and 

2 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

is not religion also a getting at the heart of 
God and of man? This statue, designed by 
George Frederick Watts, is a noble piece of 
work. 

We must remember that the towers of Lin- 
coln Cathedral seen from Somersby were the 
far-off vision of grandeur that the boy Tenny- 
son beheld. It was the first cathedral which 
he visited, and it left its great memories in 
his poems. 

Lincolnshire is the land of the birth and 
boyhood of Tennyson, and yet strangely 
enough we find no specific mention of Lin- 
coln the city or the cathedral among his 
poems, but for that matter no city seemed to 
appeal to him. He did not like the rush and 
roar of life, nor its stress and suffering. No 
city receives much attention in his poems, and 
yet he visited Lincoln often, and it was dear 
to his heart. The towers of Lincoln can be 
seen for forty miles. I have always felt that 
the lines in "The Gardener's Daughter" were 
finely suggestive of Lincoln : 

"Not wholly in the busy world, nor quite 
Beyond it, blooms the garden that I love. 
News from the humming city comes to it 
In sound of funeral or of marriage bells, 

3 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

And sitting muffled in dark leaves, you hear 
The windy clanging of the minster clock; 
Although between it and the garden lies 
A league of grass, washed by a slow, broad stream 
That, stirred with languid pulses of the oar, 
Waves all its lazy lilies, and creeps on. 
Barge-laden, to three arches of a bridge 
Crowned with the minster towers." 

This noble pile is the outstanding glory of 
the Lincolnshire country. Lincoln is a most 
fascinating cathedral town. It was an ancient 
British settlement first of all, afterward Ro- 
man, later it was early English, or Saxon, 
with its strong infusion of Danes. Lincoln 
was the "Lindum Colonia" of the Romans, 
one of their famous strongholds, and its pres- 
ent name is merely a contraction of the an- 
cient Latin. It was chosen as a stronghold 
and chief city in William the Conqueror's 
day. The base of a Roman portico may still 
be seen at Lincoln, and the pillars are out- 
lined in mosaic on the streets. An ancient 
Roman altar inscribed to the Fates is still pre- 
served in St. Swithin's Church. Hugh of 
Avalon, the earliest bishop and builder of 
Lincoln, came from Grenoble in France and 
was afterward canonized as St. Hugh of 
Lincoln. After him came a succession of 

4 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

wonderful builders, each doing his part for 
the great structure. What glorious builders 
they were! For eight centuries this wonder- 
ful pile grew, although for the past three hun- 
dred years it has stood finished and complete, 
and actually unchanged as it is to-day. We 
paused and looked at it and let that thought 
soak in. Before we were born, it had stood 
thus with its gray towers. Yea, before our 
grandfather was born, it had stood thus fin- 
ished, — yea, nine generations ago, finished! 
Lincoln cathedral sits like a queen on the 
heights of the city, a glorious vision to be seen 
for forty miles around from all directions. 

We were happily ensconced in a pleasant 
home in the Bail-gate, under the shadow of 
the cathedral towers. We had a fair garden 
to ourselves. It was growing in almost trop- 
ical luxuriance. From our windows we looked 
up at the great minster in the sunset light. 
The Laddies enjoyed the old castle near by 
us, built by William the Conqueror. With 
great glee they climbed up its narrow, wind- 
ing stairs and with happy creeping of flesh 
ventured stealthily into its gruesome dun- 
geons. We especially rejoiced in the wonder- 
ful cathedral services, and the reverberation 

5 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

of the music through the long aisles and from 
the groined roof. And we all entered into the 
medieval spirit of old Lincoln as seen in its 
merry imp, and its queer and quaint legends. 

But there is more in Lincolnshire than the 
cathedral. The whole country is a fascinating 
region. In extent it is the second largest 
shire in England; and it is full of most ro- 
mantic legend and history. Its ancient peo- 
ple were the Iceni, and their great queen was 
Boadicea, to whom Tennyson pays tribute in 
a noble poem. Its most ancient and pictur- 
esque religious house was Crowland Abbey, 
of which a stately ruin still stands, now re- 
modeled into a parish church. We reread the 
great story of it in Kingsley's famous "Here- 
ward the Wake." Aiid also reading back into 
antiquity, we find the name "Tennyson" is 
the same as "Dennison," which means the son 
of Dennis, the latter being a favorite name 
in Latin countries, a contraction of St. Di- 
onysius the Areopagite, the early Christian 
saint of Athens. 

In the North Wold of Lincolnshire is 
Tealby, which was the home of the poet's 
grandfather, Mr. George Tennj^son. The 
old house is gone, but the present one, still 

6 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

called Bayons Manor, is a grand old baronial 
hall. Here Bulwer Lytton wrote his "Har- 
old," and the park and grounds are so 
beautiful that they might well have been the 
scene of Tennyson's poem of "The Princess," 
although we have fuller evidence for ascrib- 
ing that poem's scenery to the estate of Sir 
John Simeon at Swainston in the Isle of 
Wight. 

Spalding is a most ancient town of Lincoln- 
shire, with memories of John of Gaunt and 
Geoffrey Chaucer, predecessor of Tennyson 
in the gentle craft. Stamford, anciently a 
ford of stone, is said to date to the founding 
of Rome or beyond, and once was the seat of 
Brasenose College, now at Oxford. 

Among the Lincolnshire worthies, besides 
Tennyson, are Jolm and Charles Wesley, Sir 
Isaac Newton, and Sir John Franklin, the 
latter born at Louth. Near Grantham it was 
that Sir Isaac Newton was born in 1642, 
where his father was lord of the manor at 
Woolsthorpe. And not far away is Epworth, 
where, in the rectory, the Wesleys were born. 
Gainsborough boasts that it was in its pre- 
cincts on the river Trent that Alfred the 
Great married the daughter of the chief of 

7 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

the Ganii. Tattersall with its castle and 
church was an old Roman station. We shall 
visit Louth, Spilsby, Horncastle, and Som- 
ersby a little later. But here we must remem- 
ber that another glory of Lincolnshire is old 
Boston on the Witham. Its beautiful church 
with a lofty tower, three hundred feet high, is 
a landmark and a beacon for the seacoast. But 
what interests us most is that from this city 
of old Lincolnshire, men of the type of Tenny- 
son and his ancestors went forth in 1620; and 
later, Dr. Cotton the vicar, Atherton Hough 
the mayor, and other sturdy citizens, unable to 
bear the injustice of the Uniformity Act, set 
sail for New England, to found another and 
greater Boston in America. They were a 
strong, liberty-loving, intellectual and spiritual 
people, these Lincolnshire folk. 

Much of Lincolnshire is dull and flat, like 
Holland. Henry the Eighth called this region 
of Lincolnshire "one of the most brute and 
beestilie of the whole realm." George the 
Third said it was "all flats, fogs, and fens." 
Hawthorne and Ruskin speak unkindly of it. 
But Lincolnshire is not all fen. Only one 
third of the country, the southern part where 
it is very flat, is fen land, and that is now 

8 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

practically reclaimed. The Romans began to 
drain the fens by canals, and they built sea- 
banks. The fen region is now a vast cultivated 
garden, with "wide stretches of wheat, tender 
in its green under the soft spring skies, and a 
golden glory in autumn days." And the other 
two-thirds of Lincolnshire has much of in- 
terest. A large part of the region is beautiful 
with wooded hills, deep valleys, and wonderful 
pasture meadows. Charles Kingsley knew this 
fen country well, and wrote of it with charm 
and enthusiasm. And Tennyson has immor- 
talized it by a thousand references in his poems. 
All through Tennyson's poetry are Lincoln- 
shire silhouettes, — the rooks, that rise in a 
black mass with much clamor; the haunts of 
"hern and crake"; the windy tall elm trees, 
favorites of Tennyson ; the large limes haunted 
by bees; the "pillared dusk of sounding syca- 
mores" ; and a hundred others which those who 
know well the Lincolnshire scenery instantly 
identify. Even the "Break, break, break," sug- 
gested undoubtedly by the sea at Salthouse 
Beach near Clevedon Church where Hallam 
lies buried, was written, as Tennyson himself 
tells, in a Lincolnshire lane at five o'clock in 
the morning. 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Monotonous and uninteresting in a sense 
is this Lincolnshire coast, and yet the lonely 
stretches of the shore are not without a cer- 
tain wild fascination. There is the yellow of 
the sands, the blue green of the sea hollows, 
and the fresh breezes of the roaring winds. 
Sometimes, as Tennyson says, 

"The hollow ocean ridges roaring into cataracts." 

The sea-coast town in Lincolnshire especially 
associated with the poet is, of course, Mable- 
thorpe, which in Tennyson's day was a little 
seaside village with sand as smooth as marble, 
with scarcely a rock or even a ridge of shingle 
for the waves to dash against, — only, as Ten- 
nyson wrote, 

"The low moan of leaden-colored seas." 

When he was a boy, he once ran bareheaded all 
the way from Somersby to Mablethorpe to get 
the salt breeze and a glimpse of the sea. Ma- 
blethorpe is now a popular watering-place, 
along with Skegness and Sutton-on-the-Sea. 
At Mablethorpe there is a house still shown 
as having been occupied by the Tennysons 
during the summers long ago. It was this 

10 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

region that doubtless the poet described in his 
lines : 

"The drain-cut levels of the marshy lea — 
Gray sand banks and pale sunsets, — dreary wind. 
Dim shores, dense rains, and heavy-colored sea." 

It was only the later life of Tennyson that 
was associated with Farringford and Aldworth. 
His earlier life, childhood and early manhood, 
— "the tall, melancholy-looking youth, with 
long, dark hair; the youth full of strange fan- 
cies and dreams," may be thoroughly claimed 
by Lincolnshire. His poems up to "In Memo- 
riam" were saturated with Lincolnshire, and 
even "In Memoriam" is full of loving remi- 
niscences of his youth. Some have said that no 
one but a Lincolnshire man could have written 
"Mariana" of the moated grange, with its 
weariness and desolation in the very spirit of 
the fen country. Here is so much of the 
dreary landscape over which the love-lorn 
Mariana strained her doleful eyes. "The May 
Queen" is all Lincolnshire. His intimate 
friend, Edward Fitzgerald, the poet-translator 
of Omar Khayyam, said more than once that 
Tennyson should never have transferred his 
residence to any other part of England, for 

11 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

there was no better place than Lincolnshire, 
"where there were not only such good seas, 
but also such fine hill and dale among the 
wolds." 

So we were interested in every feature of 
this Tennyson country where the poet's heart 
was nurtured. We had a justifiable curiosity 
to see the very places, and to have their aid in 
interpreting the poems and his life. You re- 
member that "literary history," as Professor 
Edmund Gosse says, "is a very different thing 
from personal history, and there are certain 
facts about the development of a poet's intel- 
lect and the direction which it took, that in- 
spires a curiosity perfectly legitimate." But 
I confess that our interest was rather more 
than literary. It was also personal, for some- 
how we loved Tennyson. 

We have dwelt thus on Lincoln and its 
cathedral and the Lincolnshire fens and the 
medieval atmosphere, because it was into these 
associations that Tennyson came as a boy, and 
the great memories never left him, but had 
their inevitable effects on all his life and work. 
Lincoln is the heart of this beautiful land of 
Lincolnshire. The Lincolnshire people are 
liberty-loving. Norse traditions linger here. 

12 



LINCOLN AND THE LINCOLNSHIRE FENS 

It is wonderful scenery, quiet but fascinating, 
marshes and meads, fens and meres. It has a 
long and heroic chronicle of struggles and con- 
quests, here in East Anglia. There is poetry 
everywhere in Lincolnshire, and Tennyson 
imbibed it in his childhood days. His poetic 
soul grew rich in this free and bountiful region. 
His work is full of these early impressions. He 
became a nature lover, sturdy and strong, and 
he came to see that all things were beautiful 
and sublime. 

We were convinced again on visiting Lin- 
colnshire that the poet is a product of his land 
and times, and especially is the home of chil- 
hood the fountain of his fancy. Memory is the 
great artist which is constantly weaving into 
new pictures the idealizations of the past. 
Tennyson is altogether English in feeling and 
speech. He has a Homeric breadth and 
grandeur; his language is often as splendid 
as that of Shakespeare or Milton, but whereas 
Shakespeare is cosmopolitan and universal, 
and Milton largely classical; while Browning 
is predominantly Italian in his themes and 
treatment, Tennyson is English to the core. 
He is almost entirely confined, and willingly 
so, to English song, English stories, English 

13 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

heroes, English landscapes, English ideals, 
both patriotic and religious. Tennyson is an 
artist. He paints radiant pictures, and within 
them is a mystic glow and awe, shadows and 
gleams and a haunting beauty, but behind 
all is a spiritual reality, of which the substance 
is the strong faith, the love of law, and the 
moral idealism of English thought and life. 
His work rises with a music and a majesty 
almost like the great English cathedral of 
Lincoln itself. He is a seer as well as a bard, 
a mighty prophet as well as a consummate 
artist. He seems to have something of the 
supernatural wisdom and the mystical magic 
of his own great Merlin. 



14 



II 

SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

SOMERSBY is in Lincolnshire in the east 
of England, within sound of the German 
Ocean, and it is in a rainy country. 
Dickens says that it always rains in Lincoln- 
shire. But we can bear testimony to the con- 
trary. In the ten days or more that we spent 
in the shire we had a speck of sunshine every 
day. It does rain on the slightest provocation, 
and often from clear skies. There is no rail- 
road to Somersby. Either Spilsby or Horn- 
castle is the point of departure by carriage for 
the village of the poet's birth, which lies about 
midway of the ten or fifteen miles between 
these towns. We chose Spilsby in order to be 
nearer the coast, and especially to the coast 
village of Mablethorpe which Tennyson loved. 
We found Spilsby a quaint little village. Its 
chief point of historic interest is a statue of Sir 
John Franklin which stands in the market 
square. He was the most distinguished citizen 

15 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

of the town, this fine old Arctic explorer, and 
we had an especial interest in him because he 
was an ancestor of Tennyson's mother. 

There is an old parish church in the vil- 
lage within whose aisles we lingered a long 
time. The beauty spot of the village, how- 
ever, is a magnificent road called "the Ave- 
nue," a long colonnade of great trees, form- 
erly the entrance to the estate of the Earl 
of Ancaster. But since the burning of the 
old mansion the estate is no longer used by 
the Earl, and this Avenue has become a pub- 
lic park. 

It was in the taproom of our little inn at 
Spilsby that we heard from many farmers 
who dropped in, some racy specimens of the 
strong Lincolnshire dialect. After listening 
attentively, and becoming somewhat familiar 
with this mode of speech, which at first was 
almost unintelligible, we read aloud one rainy 
afternoon, several of Tennyson's poems in the 
Lincolnshire dialect, — such as "The North- 
ern Farmer, Old Style," and "The Northern 
Farmer, New Style," and "The Village 
Wife," and at last could really appreciate 
them. Edmund Clarence Stedman considers 
these Lincolnshire vernacular sketches most 

16 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

successful, putting them among the best Eng- 
lish dialect studies of our times. There is 
also in these poems some touches of Tenny- 
son's humor, — for instance, where the North- 
ern Farmer says, 

"Dosn't thou 'ear my 'erse's legs, as they canters awaay? 
Proputty, proputty, proputty, — that's what I 'ears 'em 
saay." 

And those other shrewd lines: 

"Doant thou marry for munny, but goa wheere munny 
is!" 

And that modern bit of satire in "The Vil- 
lage Wife" where the causes of disease and 
death are hit off in 'the lines, 

"An' I thowt 'twur the will o' the Lord, but Miss Annie 
she said it wur draains." 

It was an all-day trip from Spilsby, — at 
least so our pilgrimage made it, with the com- 
ing and going and leisurely sauntering. It 
was a day of alternate sunshine and showers. 
We set forth in a wagonette early one morn- 
ing for our ride through the Lincolnshire 
lanes. The Lady and the Laddies were first 
of all delighted by the skylarks. It was their 

17 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

initial experience in seeing and hearing these 
wonderful songsters of the meadows. And 
surely most fascinating it was to watch the 
dainty birds in their upward circling flight, 
pouring forth joyous song until they were a 
mere speck in the heavens, and finally were 
out of sight altogether; but still the "first fine 
rapture" of their song continued, dropping 
like exultant benediction from the sky. The 
Lady could not resist quoting some of those 
exquisite stanzas of Shelley's "Skylark," as 
we drove along: 

"Hail to thee, blithe spirit! 

Bird thou never wert, 
That from heaven or near it, 

Pourest thy full heart 
In profuse strains of unpremeditated art. 

"Higher still and higher 

From the earth thou springest. 
Like a cloud of fire 

The blue deep thou wingest, 
And singing still dost soar and soaring ever singest" — 

until at last as we looked and listened, we saw 
no more, but cried with Shakespeare: 

"Hark, hark ! the lark at heaven's gate." 

The bright-colored poppies which dotted 
18 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

so many of the fields delighted the Laddies. 
They wanted to get out and gather an armful. 
Several pretty villages showed quaint houses 
and picturesque church towers as we passed, 
and at one point we came to an old mill on 
the road, with its water-wheel, pond, and 
ducks, which might well have been the scene 
of Tennyson's poem "The Miller's Daugh- 
ter," although we knew that it was Stock- 
worth Mill, some distance from this place, 
which was the one probably described by Ten- 
nyson. The entire ride is a charming jour- 
ney. It is through well-wooded country of 
soft green meadows, with many a thatched 
roof cottage along the way, and some fine old 
halls and manor-houses peering out among 
the distant trees, and here and there a wind- 
ing stream. 

We passed through Bag Enderby, a tiny 
village where still exists an old church partly 
in ruins, which was once served by Tennyson's 
father. Soon we drew near to Somersby 
itself. Do you remember the present Lord 
Tennyson's word about this country and Som- 
ersby: "Halfway between Horncastle and 
Spilsby, in a land of quiet villages, large fields, 
gray hillsides, and noble, tall-towered 

19 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

churches, on the lower slope of a Lincolnshire 
wold, the pastoral hamlet of Somersby nestles 
embowered in trees." It is a tiny village. 
Tennyson describes it in the line : 

"Huts at random scattered, each a nest in bloom." 

The old cottages and buildings have some- 
thing of exquisite charm and picturesqueness 
about them. Most of them show climbing 
roses at the door. What is known as the 
"Woodman's Cottage" on the road, is one of 
the most charming thatched-roof houses in 
England. We gave a glance at the ancient 
church, Tennyson's father's church, as we 
drove through the village, resolving to come 
back to it later, and another glance at the 
so-called moated grange on Somersby road, 
but stopped at nothing until we reached the 
quaint rectory which was our special object 
of visitation, the birthplace of Tennyson. 

It is such an old-fashioned rectory! One 
may see many such in rural England, but 
none has the association and interest for us 
as this rectory at Somersby. The house is 
not occupied now, except by a care-taker. 
We found as we went through the house that 
it was in poor condition. It was damp in 

20 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

some rooms, the paper loosely hanging on the 
walls ; most of the rooms were bare and empty 
and desolate, the roof evidently needed repair, 
if leaks here and there tell anything. Once 
when Hallam Tennyson had visited this old 
rectory, he brought the news to his father 
that the house was beginning to look forlorn 
and desolate, and with memories of the old 
days of his boyhood's home, the poet sadly 
answered, "Poor little place!" 

The house stands back somewhat from the 
road. The side of the house looking to the 
road is the less interesting view. The best 
side is that of the picturesque Gothic windows 
looking out on the gardens. The room in 
which the poet first saw the light opens out 
also upon these pleasant gardens. It was in 
this rectory on Sunday, August 6, 1809, that 
Alfred Tennyson was born. His father was 
the Rev. George Clayton Tennyson, ap- 
pointed as rector here in 1807, in connection 
with the near-by parishes of Grimsby and 
Bag Enderby. His mother was the daughter 
of Rev. Stephen Fytche, the Vicar of Louth, 
a town not very far away. Somersby at that 
time was the tiniest of villages. In 1821 it 
had only sixty-two inhabitants, and at pres- 

21 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

ent it is still smaller, — a hamlet of about 
fifty souls and six hundred acres. It is quaint 
and quiet, sleepy and serene. But in this 
little village was nurtured, and in this old- 
fashioned parsonage was born, one of the 
greatest souls of modern times. 

We entered the rectory by what Tennyson 
calls "my father's door." In the old days, 
the ivy grew around the door. The square 
hall in Tennyson's day was adorned with 
many tokens of the chase. Next we came to 
the drawing-room, which we were told once 
had many pictures and a wealth of china and 
bric-a-brac. It was sunny, with two large 
windows level with the lawn. But the chief 
room was the grand Gothic dining hall, used 
also for festive occasions, and oft its old walls 
"with harp and carol rang." 

Tennyson in after years, as his son bears 
witness, "always spoke of Somersby with an 
affectionate remembrance; of the woodbine 
that climbed into the bay windows of his 
nursery; of the Gothic-vaulted dining-room 
with stained-glass walls; of the beautiful 
stone chimney-piece carved by his father; of 
the pleasant little drawing-room, lined with 
bookshelves and furnished with yellow cur- 

22 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

tains, sofas, and chairs, and looking out on 
the lawn." 

And surely, this dining-room is one of the 
most interesting places in the house. Tenny- 
son's father designed and himself built it as an 
addition to the rectory. "Why, it looks like 
a little church!" cried the Laddies as we en- 
tered it. And sure enough it has a real eccle- 
siastical look. The door, the fireplace, mantel, 
the windows, all are Gothic, with churchly 
stained-glass still remaining in the windows. 
It is rather bare and desolate in this dining- 
room now, without furniture, rugs, or hang- 
ings. But in the old days it was full of life 
and beauty. I have a picture of it when it 
was the living room of the family, and charm- 
ingly furnished it was with its old paintings, 
books, and tapestry. Tennyson used to tell 
of the happy times that were spent in this 
medieval Gothic room during winter even- 
ings, and of the games, the music, and the 
readings. We must remember that Alfred 
was one of twelve children, of whom eight 
were sons, and with such a family there must 
have been many festive occasions, referred 
to in those reminiscent lines of "In Me- 
moriam": 

23 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

"As in the winters left behind, 

Again our ancient games had place, 

The mimic picture's breathing grace. 

And dance and song and hoodman-blind." 

We were also interested in a little attic room 
to which a dark and difficult stairway climbs, 
— a room which was a real sanctuary of the 
boyhood muse. To it he addressed the lines: 

"O darling room, my heart's delight. 
Dear room, the apple of my sight — 
A little room so warm and bright 
Wherein to read, wherein to write." 

It is a gable room with one window. Here 
young Tennyson had his first study or den. 
It was the birthplace of his youthful poems 
and the earliest of the poet's workshops, of 
which the greater ones were the attic room 
and later study at Farringford, and the splen- 
did library at Aldworth. It is related that 
one night, sitting in this little attic room, he 
heard the cry of an owl. He answered its 
hoot, and the bird flew in through the open 
window. He captured it, and after a time 
it became so tame that it would sit by him 
and rub its beak affectionately against his 
face. His poem "The Owl" portrays his in- 
timate acquaintance. 

24 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

But of course the most interesting room 
in the house is that in which the poet 
was born. It is directly over the drawing- 
room. An iron balcony is in front of its 
window, overlooking the lawn. This birth- 
room, we were glad to find, is kept in fairly 
good condition. It is most simply furnished, 
although not quite the furniture of a hun- 
dred years ago. Here on "an all-day day" 
in August, when summer is falling into the 
lap of autumn and "gilding the globe of 
England," was heard the poet's "earliest 
cry," and on that memorable day was born 
an "heir of endless fame." As we stood in 
the birth-room of the poet, with the kindly old 
dame who was the custodian of the house, — I 
meditated upon how much the opening of the 
eyes of that baby in 1809 had meant to the 
English-speaking world, and what visions of 
majesty and beauty those eyes had made all 
the whole world to see. 

We were also glad to wander over the lawn 
and the gardens on the south side of the 
house, for they had a special interest for us. 
It was here on this beautiful sward under 
the trees that Arthur Hallam used to lie and 
read aloud the Tuscan poets on summer after- 

25 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

noons. It was here that the quiet love-mak- 
ing took place between Arthur Hallam and 
Tennyson's sister, which seemed to promise 
such an ideal future. It was here also on 
the lawn that one day Arthur Hallam was 
so elated with some of the poems that Tenny- 
son had just composed and read to him, that 
he exclaimed, "Fifty years from now, Alfred, 
people will be making pilgrimages to this 
spot." How fully the prophecy has come 
true! 

The most charming view of the old rec- 
tory is this from the south, where, as Napier 
says, "the creepers clamber up the yellow- 
washed walls, and it looks so sweet one does 
not wonder at the regrets the poet had in leav- 
ing such a picturesque home. The classic 
lawn, the scene of so many gatherings, sloped 
gently away to a little garden, quaint and 
old-fashioned, intersected with walks of turf 
and girt with high evergreen hedges. In this 
secluded spot no sounds fall on the ear but 
those which belong essentially to the pure 
country, — the ripple of the brook murmuring 
in its summer sleep, the lowing of the white 
kine, the bleating of the thick-fleeced sheep, 

26 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

or the cooing in the distant woods of the day- 
long murmuring wood-pigeon." 

The orchard on the right of the lawn forms 
a sunny spot that always awoke in Tenny- 
son's mind most pleasant memories. "How 
often," the poet said, "have I risen in the 
early dawn to see the golden globes lying 
in the dewy grass among those apple trees." 
He delighted also to recall, as his son told 
us, "the rare richness of the bowery lanes; 
the ancient Norman cross standing in the 
churchyard, close to the door of the quaint 
little church; the wooded hollow of Holywell; 
the cold springs flowing from under the sand- 
stone rocks; the flowers, the mosses, and the 
ferns." The Somersby scenery, the Somersby 
memories, and the Somersby atmosphere are 
felt in all the poems of his later years, deli- 
cately sweetening the pictures. 

We looked for 

"The seven elms, the poplars four, 
That stand beside my father's door." 

There are still many trees, mostly elms and 
beeches, but the poplars and sycamores now, 
as one says, "only whisper in the Laureate's 
song." The stately elms, however, are still 

27 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

there, guarding the approach. And here on 
this beautiful lawn under the trees the Lady 
read aloud to us the special parts from "In 
Memoriam" descriptive of the old days. 

At the edge of the garden a pebbly brook 
babbles along, — the brook that Tennyson has 
immortalized. We enjoyed standing beside 
it, as it curves through the meadow around 
to the road, under the picturesque arch of 
the stone bridge. The poet used to recall 
vividly how he and his brother Charles often 
defended this bridge against the other village 
boys. All the Tennyson places which we at- 
tempt to identify are of course more or less 
idealizations when the poet describes them. 
Even this brook does not fully answer Ten- 
nyson's description in several particulars. His 
brook is largely a brook of imagination, and 
yet no one can doubt that this Somersby 
stream of his childhood had a large part in 
creating the poem. And here to its own 
music, as to-day it gurgles and splashes along 
as in the olden days, we recited as much 
as we could remember of the poem. Even 
the Laddies knew some of it by heart, and 
could sing it to a pleasant tune that they 
had learned in school in America. 

28 




SOMERSBY GRANGE. 




THE BROOK AND BRIDGE, SOMERSBY. 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

"I come from haunts of coot and hern, 
I make a sudden sally. 
And sparkle out among the fern. 
To bicker down a valley. 

"I chatter over stony ways. 
In little sharps and trebles, 
I bubble into eddying bays, 
I babble on the pebbles. 

"I chatter, chatter, as I flow. 
To join the brimming river. 
For men may come and men may go. 
But I go on for ever. 

"I wind about, and in and out. 
With here a blossom sailing, 
And here and there a lusty trout. 
And here and there a grayling. 

"I steal by lawns and grassy plots, 
I slide by hazel covers; 
I move the sweet forget-me-nots 
That grow for happy lovers. 

"I murmur under moon and stars 
In brambly wildernesses; 
I linger by my shingly bars; 
I loiter round my cresses; 

"And out again I curve and flow 
To join the brimming river. 
For men may come and men may go. 
But I go on for ever." 

29 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

As we listened to the Laddies, there came 
thoughts of Tennyson's own boyhood days, 
around this pebbly brook. He was only five 
years old when one day he cried, "I hear a 
voice that's speaking in the wind!" and made 
his first poetic line. It was prophetic of his 
whole career, — he was always hearing voices 
and seeing visions. 

On Sundays as a boy, he and his brother 
Charles sometimes wrote poems about the 
flowers of the rectory garden. In the even- 
ings it was their custom to tell long stories 
to each other around the crackling oaken fire. 
These stories continued from evening to even- 
ing. One story, called "the Old Horse," Ten- 
nyson remembered to have lengthened out 
for a month. The boys went every day to 
the village school in Somersby, which was 
held in a secluded place called Holywell Glen. 
Alfred, it is related, was not very good at 
arithmetic. He was a reserved child, solitary 
and shy. 

He was only a boy when the news came 
to the village of the death of Byron, whose 
poetry he had already begun to love. The 
announcement had a strange effect upon him. 
He crept off alone, and into a ledge of soft 

80 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

sandstone he carved with his knife, "Byron 
is dead!" Somehow it seemed to him as if 
the bottom of his world had dropped out. 
Was it not a prophecy of the sensibility and 
deep emotions of the later years? 

We were loth to leave the charmed spot. 
We listened to the birds in the trees. What 
a nest of human nightingales it was in the old 
days. Several of the family were gifted in 
song. Frederick and Charles each published 
books of poems, as well as the Laureate, and 
their verse received much recognition and 
praise. Of all the boys of this old rectory, 
Horatio stayed longest in the old home; 
Arthur traveled much, for he was often in 
bad health; of Edward we have little record; 
Charles became a clergyman, and was famous 
as a sonneteer ; the other poet, Frederick, mar- 
ried an Italian lady and lived in the Isle of 
Jersey. Alfred was the one son from this 
old rectory who went forth to become the 
nation's pride and to conquer world-fame. 

Adjoining the rectory on the Somersby 
road, on the side toward the church, is the 
reputed Moated Grange, an old-fashioned 
building that always interests visitors. About 
this queer structure ever lingered an air of 

31 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

mystery and romance. Tennyson is thought 
to describe it minutely in his poem of 
"Mariana." Here on the spot we recalled 
a stanza: 

"With blackest moss the flower-plots 
Were thickly crusted, one and all: 
The rusted nails fell from the knots 

That held the pear to the gable-wall. 
The broken sheds look'd sad and strange: 
Unlifted was the clinking latch; 
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch 
Upon the lonely moated grange. 
She only said, 'My life is dreary. 

He Cometh not,' she said; 
She said, 'I am aweary, aweary, 
I would that I were dead ! ' " 

This heavy, gloomy, moated grange by its 
somber aspect may have quite naturally sug- 
gested the poem; but the greater part of the 
poem is probably an idealization, not to be 
too closely identified, for the place does not 
altogether follow out the description. "They 
will not allow that one has any imagination," 
said Lord Tennyson once, in reference to an 
attempted close identification of some of the 
places of his poems. We must remember that 
places were to him only suggestions which 
his imagination wrought to larger issues. 
The old Somersby church across the road, 
32 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

where Tennyson was baptized, is just a pic- 
turesque old-fashioned parish church, little 
different from a hundred other parish 
churches throughout rural England, except 
that one or two pre-Reformation relics have 
been left in the church undisturbed by the 
zeal of iconoclasts. There is a Norman cross 
in the churchyard with an image of the Vir- 
gin. There is also a flat basin for holy water. 
The sun-dial over the porch seems to have 
words on it in seventeenth-century letters: 
"Time Passeth." 

In Tennyson's time this church was roofed 
with thatch, and around it were witch-elms 
and towering sycamores. 

"Wouldst thou know the beauty of holi- 
ness," says Charles Lamb, "go alone, traverse 
the cool aisles of some country church." So 
thought we in the pleasant shadows of this 
ancient house of God. Tennyson's own faith 
was nurtured here in his boyhood days, and 
many of his noblest thoughts had their begin- 
ning in this place. His greatest poem, "In 
Memoriam," is saturated with remembrances 
of Somersby. In "The Two Voices" the 
church described is supposed to be this beauti- 
ful old church at Somersby. 

33 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

In the churchyard, a place of ideal beauty 
and of refreshing stillness, Tennyson's father 
lies buried. The poet's loving thoughts go 
back to it in those lines of "In Memoriam"; 

"Our father's dust is left alone 
And silent under other snows; 
Then in due time the woodbine blows. 
The violet comes, but we are gone." 

The village of Somersby has no fame ex- 
cept as the birthplace of Tennyson. He did 
for it what the Roman poet Virgil did for 
Mantua, — he made it a sacred shrine and a 
place of pilgrimage. 

The Lady of our pilgrimage was very much 
interested in learning what she could of the 
parents of the poet. She discovered that the 
father, old Dr. Tennyson, was six feet two, 
and very strong and energetic. He was a 
versatile man of great ability, a scholar, knew 
well Hebrew and Syriac, and later learned 
Greek that he might teach his sons. He had 
a splendid library, and amid the quiet of his 
study, with long shelves of books looking 
down upon them, the children of the par- 
sonage gained their early knowledge of books, 
and read widely of Shakespeare, Goldsmith, 

34 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

Rabelais, Sir William Jones, Addison, Swift, 
Cervantes, and Bunyan. 

And what of Tennyson's mother? The 
Lady found that she had been Miss Fytche, 
the daughter of the vicar of Louth. She be- 
came the mother of twelve children — eight sons 
and four daughters — all born in this rectory. 
She was of great tenderness of heart. It is 
said that the boys of a neighborhood village 
used to bring their dogs and beat them near 
the rectory in order to be bribed to leave off, 
or to induce her to buy them. She was a 
beautiful woman. It was related of her by 
Hallam Tennyson that "when she was almost 
eighty, a daughter, under cover of her deaf- 
ness, ventured to mention the number of 
offers of marriage which had been made to 
her mother, naming twenty-four. Suddenly, 
to the amusement of all present, the old lady 
said emphatically, and quite simply, as for 
truth's sake, 'No, my dear, twenty-five.' " The 
early poem "Isabel" gives her portraiture. 
Her children loved and revered her greatly. 
She died in 1865, at the good old age of 
eighty-four. 

Tennyson always loved the memories of 
Somersby. Once in later years a little girl of 

35 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Somersby sent him some violets, and he was 
deeply touched and wrote in reply: "I shall 
keep them as a sacred treasure. The violets of 
one's own native place gathered by the hands 
of a pure innocent child, must needs be pre- 
cious to me." A letter received in 1874 from 
a Somersby lad, the son of an old bricklayer 
of his native village, now an American of 
Missouri, delighted Lord Tennyson. It was 
so full of his childhood reminiscences, for he 
was of the poet's ovni age. It told of the 
apple trees that bore such fine golden apples, 
the old fir trees where the rooks used to 
build, and ended, "Oh, sir! Perhaps no man 
in America knows as well as I where you first 
heard the wrens twitter, the blackbirds, the 
thrushes, the robins sing." It was Tenny- 
son's own brother who once remarked that 
the man who wrote "Tears, Idle Tears" could 
never forget Somersby. And it is true, the 
memory of dear old days is wonderfully en- 
shrined in that poem of the heart. 

Yes, this old Somersby village is a sacred 
spot, and this old Somersby church enshrines 
holy memories. We felt as if a benediction 
had come to us here. We loved the hedges 
of sweetbrier around the churchyard. They 

36 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

are as fragrant as loving thoughts. Outside 
the hedges we clambered into our wagonette, 
and through snatches of sunshine and frequent 
showers, during which the Laddies curled up 
under the rubber blankets, we traversed again 
the seven miles of Lincolnshire lanes along 
the flowery hollows and the tangled meadow- 
land, over hills and through pleasant valleys, 
singing "The Brook" to a lively tune and a 
showery accompaniment, and now and then, 
during an interval of sunshine, the melody of 
"Sweet and Low." 

The visits of Arthur Hallam to Somersby 
in the summer of 1832 and possibly 1833 are 
commemorated in "In Memoriam." It was 
a fair companionship that lasted for four 
years. Do you remember that letter of Arthur 
Hallam which he wrote to an intimate friend 
in the spring of 1832: "I am now at Som- 
ersby, not only as the friend of Alfred Ten- 
nyson, but as the lover of his sister." 

Poor Hallam! He died the following year, 
and the awful tragedy overshadowed Tenny- 
son and his sister for many years. A revela- 
tion of the depths of the bereavement is in 
"In Memoriam." Those special stanzas from 
"In Memoriam" which describe this Somersby 

37 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

scenery and Arthur Hallam's part in it, the 
Lady of the pilgrimage had been reading to 
me under the trees at the old Rectory as we 
loitered there, and among them were these : 

"How often, hither wandering down. 
My Arthur found your shadows fair. 
And shook to all the liberal air 
The dust and din and steam of town; 

"He brought an eye for all he saw; 
He mix'd in all our simple sports; 
This pleased him, fresh from brawling courts 
And dusty purlieus of the law. 

"O joy to him in this retreat, 
Immantled in ambrosial dark, 
To drink the cooler air, and mark 
The landscape winking thro' the heat! 

"O sound to rout the brood of cares. 

The sweep of scythe in morning dew, 
The gust that round the garden flew. 
And tumbled half the mellowing pears !" 

"I climb the hill; from end to end 
Of all the landscape underneath, 
I find no place that does not breathe 
Some gracious memory of my friend; 

"No gray old grange, or lonely fold. 
Or low morass and whispering reed. 
Or simple stile from mead to mead. 
Or sheepwalk up the windy wold; 



38 



SOMERSBY, THE POET'S BIRTHPLACE 

"The path by which we twain did go, 

Which led by tracts that pleased us well. 
Thro' four sweet years arose and fell. 
From flower to flower, from snow to snow: 

"And we with singing cheer'd the way. 
And, crown'd with all the season lent, 
From April on to April went. 
And glad at heart from May to May." 

[From "In Memoriam," LXXIX, C. XXII.] 



39 



Ill 

LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

LOUTH has the distinction of having 
given Tennyson much of his schooling 
in his boyhood days, at the old King 
Edward VI Grammar School. And hither 
went our little pilgrimage to see what was 
left of the environment of the days, — almost 
a century ago, — when Tennyson was a school- 
boy here. We had a rare choice of inns in 
the ancient town. There was The Jolly 
Sailor, The Fleece, — we resolved instantly not 
to stop there, — Ye Old Whyte Swanne, The 
Wheat Sheaf, The Royal Oak, and the Ma- 
son's Arms. We rather inclined to the latter, 
not merely because one of our pilgrims was 
a free and accepted member of the fraternity, 
but also because the place looked so home-like 
and delightful. We made friends at once 
with the landlady. She had a delightful 
frankness. "It's a dull old town," she said; 
"I thought I should die when I first came 
here; but I got used to it after a few years." 

40 



LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

We found it really a quaint old town, seem- 
ingly unchanged with the course of the years. 
It has one noble, ancient church, the parish 
church of St. James, with a lofty spire. This 
parish church at Louth is considered one of 
the finest perpendicular buildings in England. 
Its spire claims to be the second in England, 
for height and beauty, only Salisbury Ca- 
thedral excelling it. The exterior of the 
church is rather better than the interior. The 
most picturesque view of the town is from 
the ancient stone bridge on Bridge Street, 
where the antiquated mill is now the head- 
quarters of the very modern Boy Scouts, under 
the auspices of General Baden-Powell. 

First of all, we sought out the old house on 
Westgate Place, where Tennyson lodged as a 
boy. It was Tennyson's grandmother, Mrs. 
Fytche, with her daughter Mary Anne, who 
lived at Westgate Place, and Tennyson's par- 
ents often came and stayed here while Al- 
fred was a schoolboy at Louth. The house 
in Westgate Place was a second home to the 
young Tennyson. It is now an ordinary 
dwelling. Doubtless it was much pleasanter 
in the older days than at present, for there 
are remains of quaint gardens in front, and 

41 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

very near is a purling brook. Over the door 
of the house are the simple words, "Tenny- 
son's House." "It is pleasant here in sum- 
mer," said the maid who lived next door, "and 
heaps of people come here to see the place." 
Our next shrine was to be the school where 
Tennyson began his education. Tennyson 
and all his brothers were sent to this school 
at Louth. But we were misdirected and were 
soon hammering at the knocker of an elegant 
old school, ensconced amid its lawn and an- 
cient trees, and were ushered in with much 
ceremony only to find ourselves amid a bevy 
of young girls in a great music room where 
they were playing at the piano and dancing. 
We wondered whether this could be the place, 
but on being further ushered into a charm- 
ing reception room with its beautiful pictures 
and shelves of fine books, we were soon 
greeted by Miss Masson, the head mistress 
of the chief girls' school in Louth. She was 
exceedingly affable, and explained that the 
boys' school was at the other end of the same 
ground, some distance away, and she would 
herself go over and show us to the master's 
lodge. Our Lady of the pilgrimage was soon 
on the best of terms with this delightful Eng- 

42 



LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

lish schoolmistress, and our mistake ended 
most happily, for she showed us much atten- 
tion and insisted on lending us a rare book 
on the antiquities of Louth, which we felt a 
most daring way to treat strangers and con- 
fessed book-lovers. 

We found the head master of the boys' 
school living in a most picturesque old house, 
over which clambered the ivy and the roses. 
Fine lawns and gardens surrounded the 
estate. As we walked through the avenue up 
to the head master's lodge, our Laddies picked 
up some long feathers that had fallen from 
the rooks that nested in the old elms, and 
stuck them in their hats. 

Mr. Unwinn, the head master, was most 
courteous and cordial, as was also his good 
wife. He was a Cambridge University man, 
as Tennyson had been, and very quick and 
pleasant in speech. His wife told us that she 
had formerly been a trained nurse, and she 
enjoyed being a mother to the boys. "I see 
that they get plenty of good milk, eggs, and 
jam," she exclaimed laughingly. 

Many of the boys at the King Edward VI 
school are boarding pupils, and live with the 
head master and his wife at the lodge. They 

43 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

have most pleasant and commodious dormi- 
tories, as well as a gymnasium, a swimming- 
pool, and tennis courts. As we went through 
the building, we found that one commodious 
sleeping section was named the Tennyson 
Dormitory. It was about seven o'clock in the 
evening when we made our visit, and the boys 
were grouped together in one of the study- 
rooms, conning their evening tasks, under the 
direction of one of the ushers, as assistant 
teachers are called in England. All the boys 
rose and stood, as we entered the room, and 
remained standing until our exit, bowing to 
us all pleasantly as we passed out. I can see 
them yet, and it makes a happy memory. Our 
little Laddies were much pleased at this ex- 
hibition of English good manners, and we 
hope took the lesson to heart. We told Mr. 
Unwinn that we wanted very much to see a 
certain bust of Tennj^son which we under- 
stood was in the schoolroom of the ancient 
building, and would be glad to come in the 
morning at any convenient hour for him. 
"Why not see it to-night?" he asked. "It 
will be light until nine or ten o'clock." Some- 
how we had not quite realized what might 
be done in the long summer twilight of old 



LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

England, or that he would be willing to jour- 
ney over to the ancient schoolhouse at this 
hour of the evening. "But it is perfectly con- 
venient," he said. "There is a good light, and 
we do not have supper until half-past eight." 

So our pilgrimage wended its way to the 
ancient schoolhouse. It has been somewhat 
rebuilt since Tennyson's day, but occupies 
the same site, and the figiu'e of King Edward 
VI still remains from the old building. It 
has been an endowed school since Edward 
VI's day, but the pupils pay for tuition. It 
is one of the great "public schools," as they 
call them in England, which means that they 
are the most private and expensive schools in 
the kingdom. 

In the schoolroom we found a fine old 
painting of Mr. Waite, who was Tennyson's 
teacher, and also a white marble bust of the 
great Poet Laureate, by H. Garland, of 
which we secured a good photograph. It 
must be a pride and emulation to every 
scholar in the school to have the schoolboy 
memory of Tennyson their special possession. 

At the opposite end of the schoolroom a 
surprise awaited us. For there was the bust 
in bronze of Captain John Smith, founder of 

45 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Virginia, who we learned was born near 
Louth, educated at this school, and here is 
his effigy executed from the most authentic 
contemporaneous prints by that versatile sol- 
dier, General Baden-Powell himself, who is 
a descendant, or connection at least, of the 
redoubtable Virginia captain. This bust of 
Captain John Smith seemed a real discovery 
to us. 

You remember that Louth is the place where 
the first poems saw the light, and Jackson the 
bookseller must be credited with consider- 
able spirit and liberality in fathering this 
early volume. 

As we wandered through the town the next 
day, we stopped in at Jackson's, the book- 
seller and printer in the market-place. Ten- 
nyson's first book of poems was entitled, 
"Poems by Two Brothers," and was written 
partly by Alfred and partly by Charles. It 
was printed in 1827, and Jackson gave 
them ten pounds for the copyright. The 
manuscript of the early volume is now 
worth a thousand pounds. The establishment 
is still a printing shop and bookshop, kept by 
Parker, but there are no more Tennyson 
books published there. One of the members 

46 




KING EDWARD VI GRAMMAR SCHOOL, LOUTH. 




EASTGATE, LOUTH. 



LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

of the firm showed us some ancient posters 
and some very old and quaint licenses for 
printing which took us at once into the atmos- 
phere of the old days. 

Tennyson's school-days at Louth began 
at Christmas term of the year of the bat- 
tle of Waterloo. One incident of his school- 
days is specially remembered. It was the 
school-festival at the time of the coronation 
of George IV. He remembered that all the 
boys were decked out in rosettes, and that 
they had processions and much merry-mak- 
ing. 

His parents and friends say that he was 
a boy grave beyond his years, even in these 
schooldays. He was very reserved and rarely 
associated with other boys. His school life 
at Louth ended when he was twelve years 
old, and he went back to his home at Som- 
ersby for six years more with his father as 
his teacher, supplemented by the classics 
taught by a Roman Catholic priest of the 
neighborhood, and by music lessons for which 
he went to Horncastle. 

During these school-days at Louth and 
Somersby, he was doubtless learning more 
than the lessons of the schoolroom in this beau- 

47 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

tiful country of Lincolnshire, this land of 
fens in East Anglia. He was imbibing a 
sense of poetry in the very air, and nourish- 
ing a "youth sublime." Many visits he paid 
to the seacoast in the neighborhood, and espe- 
cially to Mablethorpe, then a small town in 
a flat country where the sand slowly shifts 
into banks and builds up barriers between 
seas and fields. Here he spent many dreamy 
days in verse-making, hearing "the Norland 
winds pipe down the sea." There is some- 
thing fascinating in the dreary moorland and 
barren shore of this part of Lincolnshire. It 
is a land of becks and knolls, of ridged wolds, 
of crowded farms and lessening towns, of 
glooming flats and heaving sea. There is a 
certain inspiration of poetry in the very deso- 
lateness of the landscape. Even the old Doric 
language of Lincolnshire, which is fast dying 
out, is poetic. It is full of such words as 
Grange, wold, beck, fen, shard, holm, wattled, 
mere, and copse, and the strain of the old 
Danish and Viking blood seems to come out 
at times in the spirit of the people. We may 
all see that his poems even in later years are 
redolent of the Lincolnshire scenery and 
atmosphere. His early schooling in nature 

48 



LOUTH AND THE OLD GRAMMAR SCHOOL 

remained with him. "The May Queen," for 
instance, is a true Lincolnshire picture. It is 
a lovely homespun drama, and is reminiscent, 
as all his friends say, of the Maypole danc- 
ing at Horncastle, which he had known so 
well. 

The poem "Lady Clara Vere de Vere" is 
probably suggested by Scrivelsby Court in 
this same region, a seat of the Dymoke fam- 
ily, where there are famous lions on the gate. 
"The Gardener's Daughter" is a poem full 
of the brightness and sweetness of a Lincoln- 
shire summer. "Locksley Hall" was doubt- 
less suggested by Langton Hall which Ten- 
nyson knew well. The author has confessed 
that there is really no authentic Locksley 
Hall, and no actual Cousin Amy; no real 
passion or tragedy that is commemorated. It 
is all the poet's imagination. But neverthe- 
less the scenery and the setting are distinc- 
tively of Lincolnshire. Some items in the 
description are taken from the lion-guarded 
gate of Scrivelsby Court; "the warrior with 
feet crossed" probably from Harrington 
Church; "the ivied casement" is a description 
of the old hall at North Somercote; and the 
"chapel sinking" is probably that at Bayons 

49 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Manor. It is thus all largely reminiscent of 
East Anglia. "Locksley Hall" was an artis- 
tic and poetical triumph. The whole coun- 
try rang with its music, and by that triumph, 
as one aptly said, "another King Alfred was 
crowned in England." 



50 



IV 

CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

IT was at Oxford that Tennyson in 1855, 
received an honorary degree of Doctor 
of Civil Laws. The story is related that 
he appeared before the great assembly in the 
Sheldonian Theater in rather careless array 
and somewhat unkempt hair, and the irrepres- 
sible undergraduates called out with great glee 
from the gallery, "Did your mother call you 
early, call you early, Alfred dear?" 

But it was at the other great University, 
Cambridge, that he received his college train- 
ing, although he was compelled by family 
circumstances, especially his father's sudden 
death, to leave the University without taking 
his degree. 

Our chief interest at Cambridge clustered 
around Trinity College, Tennyson's own 
college, but we found other most fascinating 
features of the beautiful university town; for 
instance, Christ College, with which the Lad- 

51 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

dies were especially pleased because while we 
sat and read poetry under the trees they had 
such a good game of ball on the lovely lawn 
where the poet John Milton had played in 
the olden days, and where there still stands 
and flourishes the very mulberry-tree which 
he planted with his own hands. In these days 
of its extreme age, the tree has to have sev- 
eral supports for its ancient limbs. These 
gardens of Christ College with their beau- 
tiful walks, and the swimming-pool, with its 
classic pavilion, are among the most charming 
things in Cambridge. Sir Philip Sidney and 
Bishop Hugh Latimer were also students here 
in their youthful days. Sidney Sussex College 
pleased us also, because it was the college of 
the great Oliver Cromwell, and Emmanuel 
College, because it was a fountain of the old 
Pilgrim and Puritan spirit and had nourished 
John Harvard and several of the Pilgrim 
fathers. King's College Chapel delighted 
both eyes and heart. It has such glorious 
stained glass like the Saint Chapelle in Paris. 
It is the most gorgeous college chapel in the 
world. 

But Trinity College was our special ob- 
ject of interest. We remembered that three 

52 



CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

of the Tennyson boys had been members of 
Trinity College. Charles and Alfred joined 
Frederick Tennyson there in October, 1829. 
Alfred Tennyson occupied lodgings in Cam- 
bridge and never lived in the college. His 
rooms were in the Corpus Buildings in 
Trumpington Street, the nearest door to 
Corpus Gate. Dining "in hall"— that is, with 
the students in the great hall of the college — 
was a severe trial to him on account of his 
diffidence. Sometimes he would sacrifice a 
meal rather than endure the hardship of fa- 
cing that crowd of students. But he did have 
the courage after much persuasion to join a 
society of congenial spirits whose numbers 
were limited to twelve, and hence called "The 
Apostles." Among them were several who 
became his lifelong friends, such as James 
Spedding, Henry Alford, Richard Monckton 
Milnes (afterward Lord Houghton), King- 
lake, author of "Eothen," and historian of 
the Crimean War, Richard C. Trench, Dean 
of Westminster and Archbishop of Dublin, 
Frederick Denison Maurice, Arthur Hallam, 
and others. Arthur Hallam's rooms were in 
the New Court of Trinity College. Thack- 
eray was a contemporary of Tennyson's at 

53 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Trinity College, although they were in a 
different set and did not get acquainted in 
University days. At Cambridge Tennyson 
wrote the first two parts of "The Lover's 
Tale." He also won here the Chancellor's 
prize for a poem on "Timbuctoo." 

It seems an odd subject for poetry, but we 
may remember that at that time the eyes of 
all the world were on Africa. A series of 
intrepid explorers had been making their way 
into the Dark Continent, and had aroused 
public interest. Timbuctoo, which had re- 
cently been visited for the first time by civ- 
ilized man in the person of a young French- 
man, was the ultima thule of African dis- 
covery. It is an interesting story which the 
poet himself tells, of how he took an old poem 
which he had composed two years before on 
the theme of the Battle of Armageddon, and 
putting a new beginning and a new end to 
it, he sent it in, under the title of "Timbuc- 
too." It was written in blank verse, although 
the usual tradition was that the poem should 
be written in heroic couplets, but such was 
the vigor and originality of Tennyson's lines 
that they won the prize in spite of this in- 
novation. 

54. 



CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

While he was in the University he pub- 
lished, in 1830, a volume called "Poems; 
Chiefly Lyrical," containing "Claribel," and 
several similar poems, "The Dying Swan," 
"Sea Fancies," "The Owl," "Ode to Mem- 
ory," and some others. The volume was quite 
favorably received, and two or three reviewers 
saw the promise of real genius in it. 

Near Cambridge is a picturesque mill that 
claims to have suggested the scene of "The 
Miller's Daughter." Several other mills, how- 
ever, have been named as having probably 
suggested the poem. Stockworth Mill, near 
Somersby, is usually considered the one, and 
yet it has been somewhat idealized in the de- 
scription. But Grantchester Mill, near Cam- 
bridge, is one that Tennyson was very familiar 
with in his student days. He was rather 
averse to having his poems too closely identi- 
fied, and once when he was asked about the 
mill he answered, "If it was anywhere, it was 
Trumpington," meaning Grantchester Mill, 
near Cambridge, but also implying by those 
words "if it was anywhere" that it was 
scarcely more this than the other picturesque 
old mills that he had in mind. 

It was in 1831 that Tennyson's father died, 
55 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

and the poet left Cambridge without taking 
his degree, and returned to Somersby. In 
1832 Arthur Hallam achieved his degree, and 
spent part of the summer at Somersby, as 
the friend of Tennyson and the accepted lover 
of Tennyson's sister. Almost thirty years 
later, when Tennyson had risen to fame as the 
Laureate of England and as one of the great 
poets of the world, his friends presented a 
marble bust of him to Trinity College. It 
was an excellent work, executed by Woolner. 
But this presentation caused a controversy 
as to its place, for some of the college author- 
ities thought that the position of the poet was 
not yet assured in the world. At first, there- 
fore, it was located in the vestibule of the 
college, but finally in later years it was given 
its rightful place in the library. It was not 
until February 1, 1868, thirty-seven years 
after leaving the college, that Tennyson paid 
his first recorded visit since undergraduate 
days to old Cambridge. He stayed at Trinity 
College at the Lodge. He made another visit 
here in 1886 with his son Hallam, and Hal- 
lam's wife. Again he stayed at Trinity, with 
the Master of the College, while the others 
stayed at the famous inn. The Bull, 

56 



CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

So we Pilgrims sought out at Cambridge 
as many of these haunts as we could, espe- 
cially in and about Trinity College. We went 
into the splendid dining hall of Trinity Col- 
lege and saw the portraits of some of the 
famous men of the college, among them Isaac 
Newton, Lord Bacon, Macaulay, Dryden, 
George Herbert, Byron, Thackeray, F. D. 
Maurice, and a dozen others, and a most 
notable portrait of Tennyson by George 
Frederick Watts. In the library we saw the 
bust of Tennyson by Woolner, and in the 
showcases were interesting manuscripts by 
Tennyson, Milton, Byron, and Thackeray. In 
the ante-chapel was a striking statue of Ten- 
nyson by Thorneycroft. It represents him 
seated in scholarly attitude in an armchair. 
His son Lord Tennyson said to me concerning 
this statue, "It is fine as a piece of statuary, 
but not altogether successful as a likeness." 

We looked into the kitchens of Trinity 
College, for this part of the curriculum 
seemed particularly to interest the Lady and 
the Laddies. Trinity is the largest college in 
England, and every day this one kitchen cooks 
dinner for more than seven hundred students. 
But Trinity College is only one out of the 

67 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

twenty or more colleges at Cambridge, and 
only one group out of the three or four thou- 
sand students in the university. I went down 
to the Corpus Buildings, and photographed 
Tennyson's rooms, while the Laddies were 
playing around the fountain in the great court 
of Trinity College, and we also photographed 
Arthur Hallam's room in the New Court. 
What a wonderful group of men this was 
at Trinity College in Tennyson's day! And 
what a contribution this one group of con- 
temporaneous students have made to English 
literature. Think of Macaulay the historian 
and essayist, Thackeray the novelist, Frederic 
Denison Maurice the liberal theologian, Rich- 
ard C. Trench and Henry Alford the com- 
mentators, and Tennyson the poet as fellow- 
students together, unconscious of the part 
that they were to play in the great world's 
life. But above all, think of what one brief 
college friendship, the friendship of Arthur 
Hallam, meant to the poet Tennyson. It 
became the fountain and inspiration of his 
noblest life, and brought forth "In Me- 
moriam," the masterpiece of his spiritual in- 
terpretation of the struggles and triumphs 
of Life and Death and Immortality. We 

58 



CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

thought of it as we wandered around Cam- 
bridge over the exquisite Bridge of Sighs at 
St. John's College, one of the most charm- 
ing vistas in all the world, and along the 
so-called Cambridge Backs, which are really 
the parks and gardens of the various colleges, 
through which the little river flows. They are 
the special glory of Cambridge, and must 
always be duly considered in discussing the 
relative beauty of the rival university towns 
of Oxford and Cambridge. They make as 
"pleasant a retreat for the pursuit of knowl- 
edge" as this old world of ours can offer, — a 
most congenial place to wander and to medi- 
tate; and here often Arthur Hallam and Al- 
fred Tennj^son wandered arm in arm, in per- 
fect companionship, thinking and talking of 
high themes, and often rowing on the classic 
river Cam, — and loving one another "with a 
love passing the love of women." Do you re- 
member the reference to these classic days at 
Cambridge in "In Memoriam," where he de- 
scribes his visit to the old college? 

"I past beside the reverend walls 

In which of old I wore the gown ; 
I rov'd at random thro' the town. 
And saw the tumult of the halls; 

59 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

"And heard once more in college fanes 

The storm their high-built organs make. 
And thunder-music, rolling, shake 
The prophet blazon'd on the panes: 

. "And caught once more the distant shout. 
The measured pulse of racing oars 
Among the willows, paced the shores 
And many a bridge and all about 

"The same gray flats again, and felt 
The same, but not the same; and last 
Up that long walk of lines I past 
To see the rooms in which he dwelt. 

"Another name was on the door; 
I linger'd; all within was noise 
Of songs, and clapping hands, and boys 

I That crash'd the glass and beat the floor. 

"Where once we held debate, a band 
Of youthful friends, on mind and art 
And labor and the changing mart 
And all the framework of the land: 

"When one would aim an arrow fair. 
But send it slackly from the string; 
And one would pierce an outer ring 
And one an inner, here and there; 

"And last the master-bowman, he 

Would cleave the mark. A willing ear 
We lent him. Who but hung to hear 
The rapt oration flowing free 

60 



CAMBRIDGE, AND COLLEGE DAYS 

"From point to point, with power and grace 
And music in the bounds of law, 
To those conclusions when we saw 
The God within him light his face, 

"And seem to lift the form, and glow 
In azure orbits heavenly-wise; 
And over those ethereal eyes 
The bar of Michael Angelo." 

[From "In Memoriam," LXXXVII.] 



61 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

THERE are many who have done Dick- 
ens' London, hunting out his homes 
and the places made famous in his 
writings; but our pilgrimage ventured on a 
new voyage of discovery. We did not know 
of a single individual who had made the at- 
tempt to learn Tennyson's London. Tenny- 
son did not love cities; he never exulted in 
them. There is no indication that he ever re- 
joiced in London, or the swarming multitudes 
of old London streets, as did Charles Lamb, 
who was so delighted with the tide of life on 
Fleet Street. Tennyson loved the country; 
he was not a city man, but a lover of the 
fields and woods and sea, and nearly all his 
life from beginning to end was spent in the 
country, with only occasional incursions into 
the crowded ways of men. He used to love, 
as he says, 

62 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

"His own gray towers, plain life and lettered peace. 
To read and rhyme in solitary fields, 
The lark above, the nightingale below. 
And answer them in song." 

Few of Tennyson's poems are therefore 
connected with London, or indeed with any 
city. These were to him places of fugitive 
sojourning, or of brief visitation. His themes 
are mostly pastoral or national themes. 

More or less often, from the time of his 
University days at Cambridge, which ended 
in 1831, until his marriage in 1850, Tenny- 
son divided his time between Somersby and 
lodgings in London. These lodgings were in 
Camden Town, and later in Lincoln's Inn. 
During this time his volume of 1832 appeared, 
containing such poems as "The Lady of 
Shalott" and "The Lotus Eaters." His first 
real volume, the "Poems; Chiefly Lyrical," 
having appeared in 1830, there was nothing 
more for ten years. Finally, early in 1842, 
"Poems by Alfred Tennyson, in Two Vol- 
umes," were published by Moxon of Dover 
Street, and contained such masterpieces as 
"Locksley Hall," "Godiva," "Sir Galahad," 
and "Break, Break, Break!" It was these 
volumes that brought him his real fame. 

63 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Edgar Allan Poe cried enthusiastically, "This 
Tennyson is the noblest poet that has ever 
lived!" Emerson gave his judgment, "No 
one has ever shown a finer ear, nor more 
command of the keys of language." While 
Dickens exclaimed, "Lord, what a blessed 
thing to read a man who can really write! 
What a great creature he is!" And then and 
there with Dickens commenced an admiration 
and friendship that was lifelong. 

Tennyson's finances during these years were 
very much straitened. But through Milnes' 
efforts he was granted a pension of £200 a 
year on the civil list of the government, and 
things went somewhat easier with him. Bul- 
wer satirizes him for receiving this pension, 
calling him "Schoolmiss Alfred." But he was 
now working on his great poem of "In 
Memoriam." He was doing this partly in 
London, partly at the seashore at Beachy 
Head, and again at Cheltenham, where Ten- 
nyson's mother now lived, — "a nasty house in 
Bellevue Place," he said. 

In 1850 came the most memorable year of 
his life. In that year "In Memoriam" was 
published; in that year he was married; in 
that year he became Poet Laureate of Eng- 

64 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

land. After a brief sojourn in the Lake 
region on their honeymoon, he settled at 
Twickenham, in the outskirts of London, and 
here he spent the first three years of his mar- 
ried life. It was the corner house in Mont- 
pelier Row, between the Thames and Rich- 
mond Road. The house was called Chapel 
House, and is still unchanged. The poet's 
study was known as the Green Room, and 
here he wrote his "Ode on the Duke of Well- 
ington." Let us recall those stirring lines 
from the famous Ode: 

"What know we greater than the soul? 
On God and Godlike men we build our trust. 
Hush, the Dead March wails in the people's ears; 
The dark crowd moves, and there are sobs and tears: 
The black earth yawns; the mortal disappears; 
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust; 
He is gone who seem'd so great. — 
Gone; but nothing can bereave him 
Of the force he made his own 
Being here, and we believe him 
Something far advanced in State, 
And that he wears a truer crown 
Than any wreath that man can weave him. 
Speak no more of his renown. 
Lay your earthly fancies down. 
And in the vast cathedral leave him, 
God accept him, Christ receive him." 

65 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Tennyson and his wife went for a short trip 
to Italy in 1851, and visited Florence, Venice, 
Milan, and Lake Como. At Twickenham his 
first child, Hallam, the present Lord Tenny- 
son, was born in 1852. In 1853, the Tenny- 
sons left for the Isle of Wight which was 
thereafter their home, together with Aldworth 
which was built in 1868. In later years in 
London, Tennyson lodged in various places; 
such as Eaton Square, in 1869; in Norfolk 
Street, Strand, and in Albert Mansions, Vic- 
toria Street, to be near his friends, the Stan- 
leys. In 1870 he took a house in town for 
three months. But most of these visits to 
London were flitting, and even the three years 
at Twickenham he felt were only temporary 
and a makeshift. None of these places very 
much repay the pilgrim, except as showing 
him interesting sections of London. 

It is much more interesting to hunt out 
some of the places where Tennyson used to 
visit his friends. For instance, the Brown- 
ings, who lived in Dorset Street. Here, on 
one visit of September 27, 1855, he read 
"Maud" to them. Dante Gabriel Rossetti 
was also there, and made a sketch of him as 
he read, — a sketch which is still preserved. 

66 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

He used to visit Francis Turner Palgrave at 
York Gate, Regent's Park, where the com- 
pany sometimes consisted of Gladstone, Wool- 
ner, and the Brownings. But the most inter- 
esting of these friends' houses where he visited 
was that of the Carlyles at Chelsea. There he 
spent many evenings. Carlyle and his wife 
were very enthusiastic over him. Carlyle 
wrote, "He is a very handsome man, — a 
noble-hearted one, something of the gypsy in 
his appearance ; he has a great shock of rough, 
dusky, dark hair, bright, laughing, hazel eyes, 
brown complexion, almost Indian looking; 
smokes infinite tobacco." 

The most personal relic of Tennyson's life 
in London is the old Cock Tavern on Fleet 
Street, at the end of Chancery Lane. Do 
you remember the stanza in "Will Water- 
proof's Lyrical Monologue," made at The 
Cock: 

"O plump head-waiter at The Cock 

To which I most resort, 
How goes the time? 'Tis five o'clock. 

Go fetch a pint of port; 
But let it not be such as that 

You set before chance-comers. 
But such whose father-grape grew fat 

On Lusitanian summers," 

67 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSOIN 

The present Cock Tavern is not the original 
one, but its legitimate successor, and keeps the 
old style and the ancient relics, and the pres- 
ent head-waiter hands out to any guests who 
are interested a Tennyson souvenir, contain- 
ing "Will Waterproof's Monologue." The 
Laddies and I ventured into the Cock Tavern 
one day and had a long colloquy with the 
head-waiter. We found that the old grill- 
room was kept as in the ancient days, that the 
floor was sanded, that the oak fireplace, the 
paneling, and the carvings were just the same 
as had been in the old room. Our American 
Hopkinson Smith, the head-waiter told us, 
was at that very time making a series of wa- 
ter colors of the old tavern, and especially of 
the interior. We heard the same old order 
given: "Chump chop! pint of stout!" Tenny- 
son's perfect dinner, as he once characterized 
it, was, in such a place as this, "a beefsteak, 
a potato, a cut of cheese, a pint of port, and 
afterward a pipe." 

The Lyceum Theater is also associated with 
Tennyson's London, because of some of his 
plays being introduced here, and all of them 
I think he himself attended. I remember with 
great pleasure having seen Irving as King 

68 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

Arthur and Ellen Terry as Queen Guinevere 
on this historic stage in its palmy days, in a 
play full of the Tennyson spirit and atmos- 
phere, although not the Tennysonian lines. 
This one had been written, I think, by Mr. 
Comyns Carr. Tennyson's greatest play pro- 
duced here was probably Thomas a Becket, 
with Irving in the chief role and Miss Terry 
as Rosamond. 

The House of Lords has also casual re- 
minders of Lord Tennyson, although he ap- 
peared here only a few times, as Baron of 
Aldworth and Farringford. 

The National Portrait Gallery has some 
splendid memorials of Tennyson. There is a 
portrait of him in middle life, alert, vigorous, 
and strong, drawn by M. Arnault, and pre- 
sented by Emily, Lady Tennyson. Here is 
also the early bust by Thomas Woolner, 
R.A., 1857, beardless, firm, stern, with set 
mouth and magnificent head of hair. This 
bust is an exact copy by Mary Grant of Wool- 
ner's work at Cambridge, and was presented 
by Hallam, Lord Tennyson. Here is also the 
famous portrait by George Frederick Watts, 
with laurel in the background. The lines of 
the face are tense and hard, the expression is 

69 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

introspective, almost painful. It is not nearly 
so idealistic a portrait as that other one by 
Watts, now owned by Lady Henrj^^ Somerset. 
The Watts portrait is among a famous series 
by the same artist, including Lord Lytton, 
William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 
Swinburne, Cardinal Manning, Max Miiller, 
Dr. Martineau, Matthew Arnold, Browning, 
Gladstone, Lecky, the Marquis of Salisbury, 
and the artist himself. 

The greatest remembrance of Tennyson in 
London is Westminster Abbey, which he 
loved. Tennyson had a profound faith in the 
living, loving God. It is related that once 
when he was wandering with his son through 
Westminster Abbey, and they had climbed up 
into the chantry, and the sound of the organ 
and the voices of the choristers rolling through 
the vast spaces came to their ears, Tennyson 
exclaimed, with much feeling, "It is beautiful, 
but what empty and awful mockery if there 
were no God!" 

And here in the great Abbey that stands for 
God, for the higher life, for the great men 
that God has given to the English people, 
Tennyson lies buried. His funeral was a 
simple and a noble one. All the previous night 

70 




PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON IN 1859, BY WATTS, OWNED BY 
LADY HENRY SOMERSET, 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

his body lay in St. Faith's Chapel, just off the 
Poets' Corner, a quiet spot, dimly lighted, and 
always reserved for devotion and prayer. And 
here the Lady and the Laddies and I went 
and sat in the stillness and the darkness and 
said a little prayer. 

Tennyson's funeral was impressive, attend- 
ed by the great men of the realm. Two an- 
thems were sung from his own words, "Cross- 
ing the Bar," with music by Dr. Bridge, and 
"Silent Voices," with music by Lady Tenny- 
son. As these latter lines are not very famil- 
iar, we venture to quote them: 

"When the dumb Hour, clothed in black. 
Brings the Dreams about my bed. 
Call me not so often back, 

Silent Voices of the dead. 
Toward the lowland ways behind me 
And the sunlight that is gone! 
Call me rather, silent voices, 
Forward to the starry track 
Glimmering up the heights beyond me 
On, and always on !" 

The slab over his grave is plain gray slate, 
marked simply, "Alfred Lord Tennyson." 
He died October 6, 1892. He was placed 
alongside of Robert Browning, who had died 

71 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

three years before, on December 12, 1889, and 
whose resting-place is marked by a slab of 
reddish marble with a lighter edge in it and 
the words, "Robert Browning." 

As we stood there, looking down upon the 
memorial stones of these two mighty prophets 
of God in their day and generation, we medi- 
tated upon the beautiful friendship that ex- 
isted between Browning and Tennyson. It is 
a rather unusual thing for two such gifted 
men in one generation, each with his own dis- 
tinct individuality and style, to be such cor- 
dial admirers of each other, and both rise to 
fame together, without the least tinge of jeal- 
ousy, each appreciating the other's artistic 
power, and maintaining not only friendly rela- 
tions, but cordial friendship. They were can- 
did with each other, they were even frank to 
say that they did not always admire all that the 
other wrote. But concerning much of each 
other's work they were full of appreciation and 
enthusiasm. Browning was one of the first to 
appreciate "Maud," even when the critics were 
covering it with abuse; and he wrote to Ten- 
nyson concerning "Enoch Arden," highly de- 
lighting in it. Among the compliments paid 
Tennyson, says his son, that which he valued 

72 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

most was his old friend Browning's dedication 
of a selection of his poems: 

TO ALFRED TENNYSON 

IN POETRY ILLUSTRIOUS AND 

CONSUMMATE, 

IN FRIENDSHIP NOBLE AND SINCERE 

Back of these memorials to Tennyson and 
Browning are the tombs of Chaucer, near by 
the monuments for Beaumont, Dryden, Pryor, 
Ben Jonson, Milton, and not far off our own 
Longfellow. Here, also, are the splendid 
memorials for many other writers of poesy, 
Southey, Campbell, and the greatest of them 
all, Shakespeare. 

Woolner's bust of Tennyson is placed there 
not far from the memorial stone in the pave- 
ment. Tennyson's place in the Poets' Corner 
of Westminster Abbey and in the Poets' Cor- 
ner of the literature of the world is well se- 
cured. He is enshrined in the hearts of all 
lovers of true beauty and nobleness, as well as 
in this sacred temple of Westminster Abbey. 
And so we say of him, as he said of the Duke 
of Wellington, 

73 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

"Here we leave liim, God accept him, Christ receive 
him." 

Among Tennyson's good friends were 
Dean Stanley and Canon Farrar. They were 
both men of fine scholarship, broad sympa- 
thies, and large attainments. Canon Farrar 
of St. Margaret's, Westminster, loved to 
preach and write on the "larger hope" in 
which Tennyson also believed. And here at 
Westminster Abbey, in sympathy with the 
faith of these great souls, we read again Ten- 
nyson's own confession of the larger hope: 

"Oh, yet we trust that somehow good 
Will be the final goal of ill. 
To pangs of nature, sins of will. 
Defects of doubt, and taints of blood; 

"That nothing walks with aimless feet; 
That not one life shall be destroy 'd. 
Or cast as rubbish to the void, 
When God hath made the pile complete; 

"That not a worm is cloven in vain; 
That not a moth with vain desire 
Is shriveli'd in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain. 

"Behold we know not anything: 

I can but trust that good shall fall 
At last — far off — at last, to all. 
And every winter change to spring. 

74 



TENNYSON'S LONDON 

"So runs my dream: what, what am I? 
An infant crying in the night; 
An infant crying for the light; 
And with no language but a cry. 

"The wish, that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave. 
Derives it not from what we have 
The likest God within the soul? 

"Are God and Nature then at strife. 

That Nature lends such evil dreams? 
So careful of the type she seems. 
So careless of the single life: 

"That I, considering everywhere 

Her secret meaning in her deeds. 
And finding that of fifty seeds 
She often brings but one to bear, 

"I falter where I firmly trod. 

And falling with my weight of cares 
Upon the great world's altar-stairs 
That slope thro' darkness up to God, 

"I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope. 
And gather dust and cliaff, and call 
To what I feel is Lord of all. 
And faintly trust the larger hope." 

[From "In Memoriam," LIV and LV.] 



75 



VI 

SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

SHIPLAKE is a little village on the 
Thames, not far from Henley, and it 
was here that Tennyson was married in 
the parish church in 1850. We must find that 
parish church, even though we have to brave 
the crowds of Henley to reach it. For it was 
the time of the Henley regatta when our Pil- 
grims set out for Shiplake, and the cars were 
crowded on this eve of the greatest day, when 
the King and the Queen were to honor the 
event by their gracious presence. There were 
throngs of students from Oxford and Cam- 
bridge going to Henley. There were cars 
full of military and naval men, and the whole 
world of London seemed to be coming out for 
the river sports, — a jolly, boisterous crowd, 
singing songs on the train. But we descended 
at Lower Shiplake, a few stations this side 
of Henley. We had a glorious walk of two 

76 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

miles or more through the fields and along 
country roads, and beside great woods. The 
skylarks were singing in the meadows, and 
we stopped and listened. Perhaps, catching 
the contagion of the student throngs whom 
we had just left, we sang American college 
songs, as we tramped along the road. The 
Laddies are good travelers and lusty singers. 
The farmers who were haying in the field lis- 
tened, for they nodded to us pleasantly. We 
saw many yellow flowers and poppies in the 
fields. 

Shiplake is a beautiful region. The post- 
office village is insignificant, but the country 
around is a charming rolling country of hill- 
sides and terraces, where many wealthy peo- 
ple from London have their beautiful country 
homes. We had tramped even more than our 
two miles as it seemed to us, and no tower of 
a parish church appeared. At last, by per- 
sistent inquiry, we found our way to a certain 
meadow road that led through the woods and 
the fields, meeting a tiny little child, named 
Lizzie, who was happy to guide us a half mile 
farther through the park. Little Lizzie was 
about five years old, and seemed a true Cock- 
ney in her speech. She chattered unceasingly, 

77 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

but all that we could make out from the much 
conversation of our tiny guide was, "I showed 
a lidy through the gite, and she gave me a 
penny for the hihy.''^ Our Laddies were much 
amazed at such astounding English. 

But we went on through the Park, by some 
exquisite views of the silver Thames, glimpsed 
through the trees, past Shiplake Court, a 
beautiful Tudor mansion, and finally we came 
to Shiplake church, where Tennyson was mar- 
ried. The church itself is not unusual or dis- 
tinctive. It is simply a beautiful country 
parish church, built of gray stone, and having 
a square tower, and there is a churchyard with 
many gravestones around it. The church 
porch is pretty but modern; the monuments 
in the churchyard are seemingly all recent. 
It is not nearly so attractive as Stoke Pogis. 

Why Tennyson was married in this church 
we wondered, and no one of whom we in- 
quired could give us the information. Indeed, 
most of the people in the neighborhood did 
not seem to be conversant with the great event. 
I recalled, however, that the Rawnsleys were 
old-time friends of the Tennysons, and the wife 
of the Rev. Drunmiond Rawnsley, the Vicar 
of Shiplake, was a cousin of the bride. 

78 




BOLNEY COURT, SHIPLAKE. 




SHIPLAKE CHURCH. 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

I also remembered having read somewhere 
that either the cake or the wedding gar- 
ments did not arrive from London on time, 
and yet they had a most satisfactory and de- 
hghtful wedding. The bride's father, some 
of the Lushingtons and two or three friends 
were the only guests. The bride, Miss Emily 
Sellwood, was a niece of Sir John Franklin 
and the daughter of a solicitor at Horncastle. 
She was the eldest of three daughters ; another 
of the sisters, the youngest, married Tenny- 
son's brother, Charles. 

The year following his final departure from 
dear old Somersby, Tennyson had written in 
a letter to her: "I saw from the highroad the 
tops of the elms on the lawn of Somersby be- 
ginning to kindle into green. Do you remem- 
ber sitting with me there on the iron garden 
chair one day when I had just come from 
London? I have no reason for asking, ex- 
cept that the morning three years back seems 
fresh and pleasant; and you were in a silk 
pelisse, and I think I read some book with 
you." 

These were the pleasant memories of love's 
young dream. For it was in 1830 that the 
fair Emily Sellwood, a girl of seventeen, 

79 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

wearing that unforgettable "silk pelisse," had 
met this Cambridge student, who was twenty- 
one. It was Arthur Hallam who brought them 
together. For one day, "while walking in the 
Fairy wood, not far from the parsonage, he 
saw through the trees coming toward him his 
friend, Arthur Hallam, walking with a young 
woman, slender, beautiful, dressed in gray. 
From that moment the poet was no longer 
fancy free." So, as it has been noted, Arthur 
Hallam by a strange premonition brought to 
Tennyson the one heart-friend to fill the va- 
cant place in his life that his tragic death 
should shortly make. And what a noble com- 
radeship was this to be, of loving friendship 
for twenty years and loving wedded life for 
forty-five years more. It is beautiful to re- 
member that Tennyson was true to his own 
ideal of the happy knight "who loved one only 
and who clave to her." 

Some have seen reminiscences of Tenny- 
son's own courting days in these lines from 
"The Letters," beginning: 

"We parted; sweetly gleam'd the stars, , 

And sweet the vapor-braided blue. 
Low breezes fann'd the belfry bars. 
As homeward by the church I drew. 

80 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

The very graves appear'd to smile. 

So fresh they rose in shadow'd swells; 

'Dark, porch/ I said, 'and silent aisle, 
There comes a sound of marriage bells.' " 

And these lines from "The Gardener's 
Daughter": 

"So home I went, but could not sleep for joy, 
Reading her perfect features in the gloom. 
Kissing the rose she gave me, o'er and o'er. 
And shaping faithful record of the glance 
That graced the giving — such a noise of life 
Swarm'd in the golden present, such a voice 
Call'd to me from the years to come, and such 
A length of bright horizon rimm'd the dark." 

It was several years before there was an 
open avowal of love, and it was many more 
years before the poet's income was suffi- 
cient to warrant marriage. But at last the 
happy time came in this memorable year, 
1850, — the year of "In Memoriam" and the 
laureateship. Tennyson was at this time 
forty-one years old, and had already come 
into fame as a poet. 

Nathaniel Hawthorne and his wife met the 
Tennj^sons, and ]Mrs. Hawthorne ^vrote home 
a full account of the occasion. "Tennyson," 
she said, "was satisfactorily picturesque, very 

81 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

handsome, and careless-looking, with a wide- 
awake hat, a black beard, round shoulders, 
and slouching gait. His voice was deep and 
musical and his hair was wild and stormy. 
He is clearly the love of love and hate of 
hate, and in a golden time was born. He is 
the Morte d'Arthur, In Memoriam, and 
Maud; he is Mariana in the Moated Grange; 
he is the Lady Clara Vere de Vere, and 
rare pale Margaret." This is Mrs. Haw- 
thorne's jubilant and fantastic description. 
She also gave a description of Mrs. Tenny- 
son. "Mrs. Tennyson had a sweet face, and 
the very sweetest smile I ever saw, and when 
she spoke to her husband, or listened to him, 
her face showed a tender happy rain of light. 
She was graceful, too, and gentle." 

Tennyson's own words concerning his wife, 
uttered long afterward, bear eloquent testi- 
mony to the beauty and harmony of this wed- 
ding. He said, "The peace of God came into 
my life when I married her." She was in 
delicate health for years, but was a most sweet 
and gracious influence on his life. She was a 
kind and appreciative critic, and a great lover 
of music. She set many of his songs to music. 
Mrs. James T. Fields describes her as she saw 

82 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

her once, in her home at Farringford in the 
prime of life, standing in her hospitable door- 
way, "In her habitual and simple costume of 
a long gray dress, and a lace kerchief over 
her head. Something in her bearing and trail- 
ing dress perhaps gave her a medieval aspect, 
which suited with the house. Again she lay 
on the couch, a slender, fair-haired lady, and 
sat at dinner in her soft white muslin dress, 
tied with blue — at that time hardly whiter 
than her face or bluer than her eyes." 

The portraits by Watts, especially one in 
exquisite outline, give something of the im- 
pression of her singular charm. Hallam Ten- 
nyson in the Memoir writes very modestly 
but very delightfully of this beautiful mother, 
whom his father "loved as perfect mother, and 
very woman of very woman." In the charm- 
ing home life and companionship begun at 
this wedding at Shiplake, Tennyson lived and 
worked for more than forty years, paying to 
her many tributes of honor and affection, and 
prophesying of her, in the dedication to 
"Enoch Arden": 

"Dear, near, and true, no truer Time himself. 
Can prove you, though he make you evermore 
Dearer and nearer." 

83 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Miss Mitford gives this picturesque descrip- 
tion of the Shiplake church: "The tower, half 
clothed with ivy, stands with its charming 
vicarage and pretty garden on a high emi- 
nence, overhanging one of the finest bends of 
the great river. A woody lane leads from the 
church to the bottom of the chalk cliff, one 
side of which stands out from the road below 
like a promontory, surmounted by the laurel 
hedges and flowery arbors of the vicarage 
garden and crested by a noble cedar of 
Lebanon." 

The church itself on the day of our visit 
was locked, so that we could not see the in- 
terior, and on our calling at the vicarage near 
by where Tennyson and his bride stayed on 
the days irmnediately j)receding the marriage, 
we found the vicar was absent, and no keys 
to be had. So we contented ourselves with 
taking photographs of the church and the 
churchyard, wondering just how the little 
wedding procession looked as it entered the 
church, and the Lady was even wondering, 
as she confessed, just how the bride might 
have been dressed. 

The day of the wedding was the 13th of 
June, 1850. It was, as Tennyson said, in a 

84 




PORTRAIT OF MRS. TENNYSON BY WATTS. 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

naive way, "the nicest wedding he'd ever been 
at." They went for the honeymoon to Tent 
Lodge on Lake Coniston in the Enghsh 
Lake district. His diary gives some pleas- 
ant ghmpses of these days : "We have a beau- 
tiful view from our dining-room windows, — 
crag, mountain, woods, and lake, which look 
especially fine as the sun is dropping behind 
the hills." They drove, walked over the moun- 
tains, boated on the lake "among the water 
lilies, by the islands where the herons built," — 
he rowing, she steering. In this diary he says 
of her: "I have known many women who were 
excellent, one in one way, another in another 
way, but this woman is the noblest woman I 
have ever known." 

Carlyle met them there in September of the 
same year, and wrote home to his wife, "Al- 
fred looks really improved; cheerful in what 
he talks, and Mrs. Tennyson lights up bright, 
glittering blue eyes; has wit, has sense; and 
were it not that she seems so very delicate in 
health, I should augur really well of Tenny- 
son's adventure." It is entertaining to find 
that Elizabeth Barrett Browning doubted at 
first the perfect fitness of Mrs. Tennyson to 
her husband's needs. She thought that Ten- 

85 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

nyson ought to have more of a critic and less 
an acquiescent admirer. But the shining testi- 
mony of Tennyson's beautiful home life, and 
the plenitude and magnitude of his great 
work show that Mrs. Browning's apprehen- 
sion was baseless, and that this wedding at 
Shiplake was to prove the greatest blessing 
of his life. 

Of their wondrously beautiful life their son 
Hallam writes: "For five and forty years they 
lived together in the peace of God. When- 
ever he was away, he wrote a letter-diary to 
her; whenever he was at home she was his 
home. From that happy day at Shiplake, he 
was like a mariner who had entered port, like 
the traveler of his own brilliant imagination, 
who had found the Happy Isles." 

We spent the evening at Windsor, after 
this pilgrimage to Shiplake. We were quar- 
tered in a quaint hotel at the bridge on the 
river, just under the shadow of the royal 
castle, and for an hour or more we rowed on the 
river with the Eton College students. How 
the Laddies were delighted with the quaint 
Eton boys, and this hotel on the bridge of the 
river under the shadow of the castle was the 
dearest place they had ever known. It was a 

86 



SHIPLAKE AND THE WEDDING DAY 

most charming summer evening, and as we 
floated up and down the stream, and had the 
varying views of the mighty castle from many 
points of vantage, it loomed up more superbly 
than I had ever seen it. As the sunset light 
shone upon it, and bathed it with refulgent 
glory, I could think of nothing finer than this 
great castle with its many towers and turrets 
for the splendid stronghold of the mystical 
Camelot of King Arthur. That evening gave 
a vision finer than anything ever drawn by 
Dore's gorgeous and magical pencil. Here 
were the witchery and majesty of Camelot be- 
fore us, and we floated down the river in our 
picturesque craft like the Lady of Shalott 
floating down to many-tower'd Camelot. 

Somehow Tennyson seems to us just such 
an one as his own ideal knight, King Arthur, 
and his great poetical structures are as mar- 
velous as any Castle of Camelot, and his own 
true and fair and faithful wife crowning him 
with her transfiguring love is truly the most 
royal Queen of royal romance. 

It was in his final volume that Tennyson, 
the devoted husband-lover, paid a last tribute 
to his beloved wife in the dedicatory lines: 



87 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

'There on the top of the down. 

The wild heather round me and over me June's high 
blue. 
When I looked at the bracken so bright and the heather 
so brown, 
I thought to myself I would offer this book to you. 
This, and my love together. 

To you that are seventy-seven. 

With a faith as clear as the heights of the June-blue 
heaven. 
And a fancy as summer-new 

As the green of the bracken amid the gloom of the 
heather." 



88 



VII 

CLEVEDON, THE SHRINE OF ARTHUR 
HALLAM 

IT is wonderful what a deep impression 
Arthur Hallam made on his generation. 
"He was as near perfection as mortal 
man can be," was the judgment of Alfred 
Tennyson ; his father, Henry Hallam, the his- 
torian, wrote that "he seemed to tread the 
earth as a spirit from some better world"; 
Henry Alford, dean of Canterbury, himself a 
scholar and poet, said of him: "His was such 
a lovely nature that life seemed to have noth- 
ing more to teach him"; and Gladstone, who 
was also a great admirer, said, quoting from 
Aubrey de Vere: 

"I marked him 
As a far Alp, and loved to watch the sunrise. 
Dawn on his ample brow," 

He wrote, when the news of Hallam's death 
came to him, "I walked upon the hills to muse 
upon this very mournful event, which cuts 
me to the heart." 

89 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

The friendship of Arthur Hallam and Ten- 
nyson is one of those rare and beautiful 
friendships which seem altogether ideal. They 
became inseparable friends at Trinity College, 
Cambridge. They went together on a roman- 
tic journey to the Pyrenees in 1830, and in the 
summer of 1831 they had traveled in com- 
pany to the Rhine. They were both members 
of the little college society called "The Apos- 
tles." They were often friendly rivals in their 
studies. 

Arthur Hallam was also a poet, and was a 
fellow-contestant with Tennyson for the 
Chancellor's Medal for the prize poem at 
Cambridge, — the prize that the future Lau- 
reate won with his poem of "Timbuctoo." 
Hallam had not suj)reme gifts in a poetical 
line; his talent lay in other ways. Tennyson 
once said of him: "If he had lived, Arthur 
Hallam would have been known as a great 
man, but not as a great poet." Hallam's own 
particular literary bent was toward literary 
criticism. Indeed, it was his sane and friendly 
criticism which encouraged Tennyson to pub- 
lish his early poems. Hallam was sure of 
Tennyson's genius from the very start. He 
told his close friend, Gladstone, in 1829, that 

90 



CLEVEDON 

Alfred Tennyson was bound to become one 
of the greatest poets of his time. 

It was in the summer of 1830 that Hallam 
visited Tennyson at Somersby. Together 
they read the Tuscan poets on the lawn. 
Later Hallam became engaged to Tennyson's 
sister. He had taken his degree at Trinity 
College, Cambridge, in 1832. He spent an- 
other summer with the Tennysons at the old 
rectory at Somersby. In October of that year 
he was in London, living at 67 Wimpole 
Street. "Always at sixes and sevens," he 
used to say. 

Hallam had never been very strong in 
health, and it was thought that European 
travel might benefit him. He went on a trip 
to Germany and Austria. Traveling on a wet 
day between Vienna and Pesth, he caught a 
severe cold which developed into intermittent 
fever and influenza. After a few days' ill- 
ness, he died at Vienna, on September 15, 
1833. His body was brought back to Eng- 
land, and in January, 1834, he was buried in 
the old parish church at Clevedon, which be- 
longed to his mother's father, Sir Abraham 
Elton, who owned the Clevedon estate and 
lived at Clevedon Court. 

91 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

The death of Hallam was a terrible blow 
to Tennyson and to the sister to whom Hal- 
lam was engaged to be married. Tennyson 
was too overwhelmed by this sorrow to do any 
literary work for a long time, but gradually 
he found solace in putting something of his 
tribute of affection into verse, and of making 
it also a chronicle of his faith and doubt 
concerning immortality, and in the end, after 
many years, these poetical fragments and 
confessions were gathered together and pub- 
lished under the title, "In Memoriam." 

The beauty, the dignity, the heroic struggle 
and the deep pathos of "In Memoriam" make 
it one of the noblest epitaphs ever written 
upon mortal man. The tribute of that dis- 
tinguished English preacher, Frederick W. 
Robertson, was: "To my mind and heart the 
most satisfactory things that have been ever 
said on the future state are contained in this 
poem." The poem is so noble in diction, so 
deep and high in thought, and so voicing the 
universal sorrow of humanity and its most 
exultant faith, that it is worthy to be set side 
by side, if not above, either Milton's "Lyci- 
das" or Shelley's "Adonais." 

We found the modern Clevedon a charming 
92 



CLEVEDON 

little watering-place, somewhat fashionable but 
still refined and quiet, looking out on the 
Bristol Channel. There is an iron pier run- 
ning out into the water, a beautiful stone 
parade and promenade along the shore, con- 
cert halls and fine hotels, and pleasant resi- 
dences. One of the humbler homes at Cleve- 
don is Coleridge's cottage, where he lived for 
a time after his marriage. He had discovered 
Clevedon in the summer of 1795, when he was 
living at Bristol, which is only fifteen miles 
away. Here the two poets, Southey and 
Coleridge, were forming their Utopian plans 
to go . to America and form an ideal settle- 
ment on the banks of the Susquehanna. But 
suddenly the plans were dashed to pieces by 
Coleridge getting married and renting this 
cottage at Clevedon. Two days after the mar- 
riage he sent back to Bristol for some for- 
gotten necessities in an amusing note which 
ran, "Send at once a teakettle, a candle-box, 
dust-pan, two glasses for the washing stand, 
two spoons, a cheese-toaster, a pair of slip- 
pers, a Bible, and a keg of porter." This is 
an odd glimpse into the temperaments and 
needs of poets. Some traces of the local color 
of Clevedon and its vicinity are found in many 

93 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

of Coleridge's poems, and even in "The An- 
cient Mariner." 

Another hterary man who often came 
to Clevedon was Thackeray. Portions of 
"Henry Esmond" were written during one of 
his visits here. He was present also in Cleve- 
don at the funeral of Henry Hallam in 1850. 
Indeed, the "Castlewood" of Thackeray's 
novel is without doubt suggested by the gables 
and terraced gardens of Clevedon Court, which 
he knew so well. 

Clevedon Court is yet the particular pride of 
the town, and is still owned and occupied 
by the Eltons, as lords of the manor. In 
the more ancient days it was owned by the 
Wakes, who claimed descent from the great 
"Hereward the Wake." It has traceried win- 
dows and Gothic gables and is picturesquely 
clothed with vines and mellowed by the cen- 
turies. The great hall of the manor house 
is oak-wainscoted and has a fine Tudor chim- 
ney-piece, a minstrels' gallery, and many fam- 
ily pictures. The library preserves many let- 
ters and caricature sketches by Thackeray. 

We walked along the seashore at the part 
called Salthouse Beach, and there in the shade 
of the trees we read Tennyson's poem, 




CLEVEDON COURT. 




COLERIDGE'S COTTAGE, CLEVEDON. 



CLEVEDON 

"Break, Break, Break," for it was at this 
spot that the poem was suggested to him. 

"Break, break, break. 

On thy cold gray stones, O Sea! 
And I would that my tongue could utter 
The thoughts that arise in me. 

"O well for the fisherman's boy. 

That he shouts with his sister at play! . 
O well for the sailor lad. 

That he sings in his boat on the bay! 

"And the stately ships go on 
To their haven under the hill: 
But O for the touch of a vanish'd hand. 
And the sound of a voice that is still! 

"Break, break, break. 

At the foot of thy crags, O Sea! 
But the tender grace of a day that is dead 
Will never come back to me." 

Our chief interest, however, in Clevedon, 
was the old parish church where Arthur Hal- 
lam lies buried. It was on the day after 
his marriage at Shiplake that Tennyson had 
gone to Clevedon as the guest of Sir C. A. 
Elton, of Clevedon Court, and he wrote con- 
cerning that visit to the old church, "It seemed 
a kind of consecration to go there." 

95 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

We had always loved those lines from "In 
Memoriam" (LXVII) : 

"When on my bed the moonlight falls, 
I know that in thy place of rest 
By that broad water of the west. 
There comes a glory on the walls; 

"Thy marble bright in dark appears, 

As slowly steals a silver flame 

Along the letters of thy name. 

And o'er the number of thy years. 

"The mystic glory swims away; 

From off my bed the moonlight dies; 
And closing eaves of wearied eyes 
I I sleep till dusk is dip't in gray: 

I 

( "And then I know the mist is drawn 
A lucid veil from coast to coast, 
And in the dark church like a ghost 
Thy tablet glimmers in the dawn." 

The "dark church" that enshrines the "glim- 
mering tablet" is a mile or so from the station, 
and we walked out along the country road. 
From the hill near by we could get a good 
glimpse of the sea. It is a quaint little par- 
ish church, similar to a thousand that can be 
seen in rural England, and is dedicated to 
St. Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. Its 

96 



CLEVEDON 

central tower is low and undecorated; it has 
small Norman belfry windows, and in the in- 
terior some finely molded arches. In the 
south transept is the manorial chapel where 
Arthur Hallam lies buried. There is an "In 
Memoriam" window here, containing the quo- 
tation, "Strong son of God, immortal Love," 
and the pictures in the glass are of David and 
Jonathan and Mary and St. John, as types 
of most loving friendship. 

The famous epitaph on Arthur Hallam 
was written by Henry Hallam, the historian. 
Part of it reads as follows : "And now in this 
obscure and solitary church repose the mortal 
remains of one too early lost for public fame, 
but already conspicuous among his contempo- 
raries for the brightness of his genius, the 
depths of his understanding, the nobleness of 
his disposition, the fervor of his piety, and 
the purity of his life." 

There are other family memorials in the 
same chapel, and some of them reveal a singu- 
lar fatality in the family. One is a mural 
tablet to Arthur Hallam's cousins, Abraham 
and Charles Elton, aged fourteen and fifteen, 
drowned at Burnbeck, and found resting in 
each other's arms on the Welsh coast op- 

97 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

posite. The epitaph reads: "The flood was 
greater than their strength though not than 
their love." There is a tablet to Henry Fitz- 
maurice Hallam, who also died after a short 
illness in a foreign land, at Sienna, in 1850. 
The remains of Arthur Hallam are buried 
in the same vault with those of his sister 
Eleanor, who died at the age of twenty-one, 
while he died at the age of twenty-three. 

We remembered here on the banks of the 
Severn those lines from "In Memoriam" 
(XIX), which tell of this "pleasant shore 
within the hearing of the wave": 

"The Danube to the Severn gave 

The darken'd heart that beat no more; 
They laid him by the pleasant shore, 
And in the hearing of the wave. 

"There twice a day the Severn fills; 
The salt sea-water passes by. 
And hushes half the babbling Wye, 
And makes a silence in the hills. 

"The Wye is hushed nor moves along. 
And hush'd my deepest grief of all. 
When fiU'd with tears that cannot fall, 
I brim with sorrow, drowning song." 

Clevedon is a quiet place in which to rest. 
Here by the sea, in the midst of hills, heath, 

98 




THE OLD CHURCH, CLEVEDON. 




INTERIOR OF CLEVEDON CHURCH. 



CLEVEDON 

and wood, the whole place seemed suffused 
with peace, beauty, and poetry. One who 
knows Clevedon well by long residence has 
written thus of it: "The witchery of the Chan- 
nel is felt here at its full. The vagaries of the 
ever-changing distances, the play of sun and 
moon, of clouds and mist, over the waters with 
their kaleidoscopic color-effects; the flaming 
sunsets ; the flashing of the coastwise and Chan- 
nel lights; the constant coming and going of 
ships along this great ocean way; most of all, 
the majesty of the incoming waters of a sea 
that rises full forty feet at high tide, — all 
these play a part in the magic of the Channel 
which can be realized more fully at Cleve- 
don than at any other place." 

We sat in the transept of the church under 
Arthur Hallam's tablet, — the Lady, the Lad- 
dies, and I, having the church all to our- 
selves, — and read aloud all the parts of "In 
Memoriam" which had special reference to 
Arthur Hall am and this Clevedon church. 
Do you recall these lines: 

"Fair ship, that from the Italian shore 
Sailest the placid ocean-plains 
With my lost Arthur's loved remains, 
Spread thy full wings, and waft him o'er. 

99 



J'HROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

"So draw him home to those that mourn 
In vain; a favorable speed 
Ruffle thy mirror'd mast, and lead 
Thro' prosperous floods his holy urn. 

"All night no ruder air perplex 

Thy sliding keel, till Phosphor, bright 
As our pure love, thro' early light 
Shall glimmer on the dewy decks. 

"Sphere all your lights around, above; 
Sleep, gentle heavens, before the prow; 
Sleep, gentle winds, as he sleeps now, 
My friend, the brother of my love." 

"I hear the noise about thy keel; 

I hear the bell struck in the night; 
I see the cabin window bright; 
I see the sailor at the wheel. 

"Thou bring'st the sailor to his wife. 
And travel'd men from foreign lands; 
And letters unto trembling hands; 
And thy dark freight, a vanish'd life. 

"So bring him; we have idle dreams; 
This look of quiet flatters thus 
Our home-bred fancies; O to us, 
The fools of habit, sweeter seems 

"To rest beneath the clover sod, 

That takes the sunshine and the rains. 
Or where the kneeling hamlet drains 
The chalice of the grapes of God." 

[From "In Memoriam," IX, X.^ 

100 



VIII 

HAWARDEN, THE HOME OF A LIFELONG 
FRIEND 

GLADSTONE was one of Tennyson's 
earliest and best friends, and the 
friendship continued for their life- 
time. They were born in the same year, the 
memorable year 1809, and together are among 
the chief ornaments of the Victorian Age. 
They were often in counsel together, and they 
made several summer trips in company. 
Many letters were exchanged between them 
at crucial political occasions and concerning 
special literary affairs. It was through Glad- 
stone's persuasion that Tennyson finally ac- 
cepted the peerage as a tribute to literature. 
So we included a visit to Gladstone's home 
in our Tennysonian pilgrimage. 

It was almost sunset time as we came to 
Hawarden, — indeed, it seemed almost dusk, 
for the sky was overcast. We wondered 
whether we were to have any sunset at all, 
although the earlier afternoon had promised 

101 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

well. Now the Welsh mountains were dimly 
blue in the far-off mists, and the night seemed 
to be gathering early. 

"Isn't it glorious?" exclaimed the Lady, 
as after winding along the narrow streets 
of the little village, at last we had entered 
the grounds of the castle enclosure. It was 
a rolling park of hills and dales, of deep glens, 
and of distant views of wonderful beauty. 
The ancient trees were magnificent ; the sward 
was perfect, — the growth of centuries. 

Suddenly, "There's the castle!" cried the 
Laddies. It was the old castle on the hill, 
the ancestral home of Gladstone's wife, that 
came into view before we reached the new 
and splendid castle which was Gladstone's 
home for many years. The venerable ruin on 
the hill consists, as far as we could see, of one 
great tower, partly crumbling, but that one 
tower tells the romantic story of the power 
and prowess of the ancient days. From the 
vantage of this height there is a broad out- 
look on the surrounding country, and from 
this ancient stronghold we look down upon 
the modern castle, with its beautiful terraces 
and exquisite old-fashioned gardens. 

We had spent the morning at the palatial 
102 



HAWARDEN 

home of the great aristocrat, the Duke of 
Westminster, at Eton Hall on the Dee. It 
was a significant contrast to us to visit on 
the afternoon of the same day the less pre- 
tentious but still stately and dignified home 
of the great commoner, Mr. Gladstone, — 
whom many Englishmen contend was the 
greatest statesman and the greatest man that 
the world produced in the last century. 

You will remember that this castle home, 
the new one as well as the old, came to Glad- 
stone by marriage, through his wife, the 
daughter of Sir Stephen Glynn. Its towers, 
battlements, and bastions are architecturally 
strong, but not at all warlike. They are de- 
lightfully softened by the clustering ivy, and 
one feels that it is essentially not a castle- 
stronghold, but a home of peace, — a noble yet 
a cosy mansion, enshrining within its mul- 
lioned windows and wide casements and beau- 
tiful terraces every evidence of modest wealth 
and world-old culture. 

The Laddies tried to make friends with the 
Gladstone sheep that were wandering in 
groups over the glades, but the animals fled 
precipitously at the kindly approach. They 
seemed coy, perchance distrustful, of Ameri- 

103 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

can lads. But nothing daunted, the Laddies 
"performed" for the sheep, and repeatedly- 
rolled down the hillocks of the velvet sward, 
over and over again to the foot, while the sheep 
seemed to look on from the distance with silent 
wonder. I hope the Honorable Herbert Glad- 
stone, who now occupies the castle, did not 
observe this performance from his window. 
But if he did, I am sure it was with a kindly 
and indulgent eye. For was it not a sign and 
symbol to him that even American boys felt 
perfectly at home on the great commoner's 
lawn? 

At the Gladstone Memorial Fountain in 
the public squaxe, the Lady detained a ven- 
erable woman who was limping slowly along 
and chatted with her, asking questions about 
Gladstone. "Aye, I served him his paper 
every day, and my father before me. Mr. 
Gladstone was a good man, — a dear good old 
man," she said, and her face was full of sun- 
shine at the remembrance. 

At the church where Gladstone attended, — 
St. Deiniol's in the Welsh, or as we would call 
it, St. Daniel's, — we were wonderfully im- 
pressed with the magnificent memorial to Mr. 
and Mrs. Gladstone which had been recently 

104 



HAWARDEN 

placed there. It reminded us of one of the 
royal tombs at Charlottenburg, where the 
colored light so strikingly falls upon the mar- 
bles. This sarcophagus is of white marble in 
a side chapel, the recumbent figures of the 
Prime Minister and his wife lie side by side, 
and over them bends a guardian angel. It is 
exquisitely sculptured. They are represented 
in the prime of life. Mrs. Gladstone is very 
beautiful, and the Premier's countenance is 
strong and rugged. Was it not a happy 
thought that the marble presented them to us 
in the very prime and glory of their fullest 
maturity, before any of the signs of age had 
come? It was a symbol, if not of eternal 
youth, yet of eternal strength and beauty. 

Around the base of the marble sarcopha- 
gus are symbolic bronzes showing Mr. 
Gladstone's favorite heroes and epochs in his- 
tory. 

Near by is the reading desk, from which, 
as was the custom in this church, he was in- 
vited to read the Scripture lesson; and close 
at hand is the pew where he always sat. This 
golden cross in the pew is where Archbishop 
Benson died while he was Gladstone's guest. 
That great window to the west is by Sir Ed- 

105 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

ward Burne- Jones and is called "the Thanks- 
giving window," because it was given by Mr. 
Gladstone's sons and daughter and nephews 
and nieces as a thanksgiving for the long 
years that Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone had been 
spared to them. It was given in his lifetime. 
Mr. Gladstone saw the design and approved 
of it, but he never saw the finishing of the 
window. It was put in its position in the 
church while he was very ill, just a week be- 
fore he died, and just two weeks before its 
artist, Burne-Jones, passed away. Its design 
shows the Preraphaelite conception of the 
Nativity, with the multitudes of radiant 
angels about the mother and the child. 

As we looked at it, the skies behind, which 
had been long overcast, suddenly brightened 
and the sunset light came streaming through, 
and the window was one effulgent blaze of 
glory. Across the church, in the new stream 
of light, we could see the Gladstone tablet on 
which was carved his own Latin rendering of 
the great hymn, "Rock of Ages, Cleft for 
Me," and beyond that another tablet on which 
are the significant words, quoted from him, 
and constituting a splendid confession of his 
faith: "All that I think and write is based 

106 



HAWARDEN 

on the divinity of our Lord, the only hope of 
this old world." 

At this moment, the old sexton came 
shuffling through the church, and nodded 
pleasantly to us. "Would the lads like to 
come up into the belfry with me, and help 
me ring the bells?" he asked. They were 
only too glad for such a unique opportunity, 
and up the winding belfry stairs went old 
age and laughing childhood together, and 
soon the Lady and I, who waited below and 
read the inscriptions on the wall-tablets of 
the church, heard the bells ringing joyously 
for the evening service of seven o'clock. To 
us, those ancient church-bells seemed to have 
a new touch of American exultancy in their 
chiming. The Laddies came down from the 
belfry delighted, and reported in whispers 
that the old sexton had allowed them "really" 
to ring the bells, sometimes to help him and 
sometimes "all by themselves." Never will 
they forget this happy experience in the bel- 
fry of Gladstone's church. 

For a while before evening service we 
walked with the old man through the church- 
yard and among the tombstones. He pointed 
out the Gladstone lot, where "our late Squire 

107 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Gladstone" lies buried. The great Mr. and 
Mrs. Gladstone, he explained, were buried in 
Westminster Abbey. For Mr. Gladstone had 
once said to his wife, "Where would you 
like to be buried?" and she had answered, 
'Tt makes no difference to me, except to be 
with you." So their places were selected in 
this family lot on the quiet hillside. But when 
popular demand after Gladstone's death in- 
sisted that he be buried among the statesmen, 
warriors, poets, and kings in Westminster 
Abbey, it was made conditional by the family, 
that if he were buried there his wife in due 
time should also lie by his side. 

"Now off there," said the old sexton, point- 
ing with his hand, "are the sands of Dee," 
and we could see them well from the church- 
yards. You know the famous story, when 
"Mary called the cattle home, across the sands 
of Dee." 

The old sexton is so interesting, and the 
Laddies are so delighted with their experi- 
ences, and the Lady so loved to meditate in 
these ancient aisles and among the quaint 
tombstones, that the time slips away more 
rapidly than we think, and we have missed our 
tea. But we stop at a pastry shop and buy 

108 



HAWARDEN 

a good round raisin loaf, and on the train, 
where we have a compartment all to ourselves, 
we make four goodly fellowship portions and 
munch the frugal cake slowly, with most 
kindly thought in memory of our delightful 
visit to Hawarden. As the train slips away 
from the Welsh mountains, and Hawarden 
itself is lost to view in the gathering night, 
our last thought is, "Friend of Tennyson, ap- 
preciator of him, counselor and real kinsman 
in spirit, we love to think of you together, — 
two great Englishmen, two noble specimens 
of humanity, two great representatives of 
noble thinking and of Christian faith." 

As we thought again of Gladstone's strong 
confession of faith, we remembered also Ten- 
nyson's confession of faith, in those dedicatory 
lines of "In Memoriam," which Gladstone so 
much admired. Indeed, the lines are in the 
finest spirit of both these great souls: 

"Strong Son of God, immortal Love, 

Whom we, that have not seen thy face. 
By faith and faith alone, embrace. 
Believing where we cannot prove; 

"Thine are these orbs of light and shade; 
Thou madest Life in man and brute; 
Thou madest Death; and lo, thy foot 
Is on the skull that thou hast made. 

109 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

"Thou wilt not leave us in the dust: 

Thou madest man, he knows not why. 
He thinks he was not made to die; 
And thou hast made him; thou art just. 

"Thou seemest human and divine. 

The highest, holiest manhood, thou; 
Our wills are ours, we know not how; 
Our wills are ours, to make them tliine. 

"Our little systems have their day; 

They have their day and cease to be; 
They are but broken lights of thee. 
And thou^ O Lord, art more than they." 



110 



IX 

FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

ATsT isle of magic, an isle of dreams, is 
this wonderful little island-kingdom 
over which the memory of the new 
King Alfred is still sovereign. It is the island 
home of Tennyson, which he loved for forty 
years and by loving he made it all his own 
as surely as if he had bought it all with gold. 
One cannot think of the Isle of Wight with- 
out thinking of the famous poet laureate. 
Upon all its places of beauty he has entwined 
the finer beauty of his own mystical music. 
Every part of its scenery he loved, — its 
streams and its lanes, its castles and its cliffs, 
— and something of its rare and wonderful 
atmosphere has entered into the beauty and 
majesty of his verse. 

The Laddies felt that they were in fairy- 
land from the moment of stepping on the 
magic shores of the Isle of Wight. We had 
been brought hither by the royal craft called 

111 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

the Princess Beatrice, down through South- 
ampton waters, getting glimpses of the ex- 
quisite Netley Abbey on the one side and 
the frowning Calshot Castle on the other; 
then across the Solent, through a fleet of 
great battleships of the British navy, on to 
Cowes, which is the famous center for the 
royal yacht regattas. It is a most quaint little 
village, with some streets running up almost 
perpendicularly, and very picturesque and 
delightful houses, and here the famous Dr. 
Thomas Arnold of Rugby was born. 

The Isle of Wight, as we have said, is an 
island-kingdom, almost a little principality of 
its own. Its royal governor is the Princess 
Beatrice of Battenberg; its deputy governor 
lives at Carisbrooke Castle. We went from 
one end of the island to the other, through 
the center and around the circumference, and 
everywhere it was to us a delight, and almost 
as enchanting as that land which the Laddies 
most love, — Alice's Wonderland. 

The island reminded us of our American 
Mt. Desert, which has its beautiful cliffs of 
granite, while these are of chalk. Mt. Desert 
has higher hills and mountains than the Isle 
of Wight, and its villages, such as Bar Har- 

112 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

bor, Seal Harbor, and Northeast Harbor, are 
as beautiful in a way as anything in the Isle 
of Wight, except that they have not that won- 
derful charm of antiquity and of historic as- 
sociation. 

We went by slow approach to Farringford, 
saving that for the climax of our pilgrimage, 
and getting glimpses on the way of some of 
the places that Tennyson loved. We had 
read how he visited the Queen at Osborne 
House, particularly of that touching visit after 
her great sorrow, and when she wanted espe- 
cially to thank him for the dedication of the 
"Idylls of the King" to the memory of Prince 
Albert. Osborne House was the favorite resi- 
dence of Queen Victoria, and the home from 
which the gracious Queen passed from this 
earth. It is beautifully situated, with fine 
terraces and gardens and wonderful outlooks 
on the sea. Among the state apartments we 
enjoyed most the East India or Durbar room, 
where were gathered and shown all the mag- 
nificent presents that the Indian princes and 
principalities had presented Queen Victoria 
at the time of her Diamond Jubilee. So 
gorgeously beautiful were these shrines and 
caskets, and of such marvelous workmanship, 

113 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

that they seemed like a vision of the "Arabian 
Nights." They gave most vivid impression of 
the beauty and richness of the golden Indies. 

The Laddies were particularly interested in 
the Swiss cottage on the palace estate, where 
the royal children used to play. Each royal 
child had its own garden, and their garden 
tools are still kept with their names upon 
them. Here are the spade and rake that the 
present King of England used when he was 
a boy of five; and over yonder is a little 
fortress perfect in every respect and yet in 
miniature, with its bastions and battlements 
and its cannon, and the moat around it, — all 
constructed by the royal children of forty 
years ago. 

Newport is the chief town of the center of 
the island. It has a fine old church and a 
market cross. 

Carisbrooke Castle is the governor's castle 
of the Isle of Wight. Here King Charles I 
was imprisoned, and here his daughter the 
Princess Elizabeth died. It is charmingly 
situated in a beautiful country, with wonder- 
ful views from walls, battlements, and towers. 
The main part of the castle is in excellent 
repair. It brought to mind very vividly those 

114 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

old days of the Puritan Commonwealth, when 
they made kings do their will, and brought 
them to the block if they did not. The build- 
ing is a very fine example of a medieval 
stronghold ; there are a dozen great structures, 
I suppose, within the castle enclosure. 

One most interesting building shows the 
very room in which Charles I was a prisoner, 
and another is the little chapel of St. Nicholas 
in Castro which has been restored in memory 
of King Charles the Martyr. At one end 
of it is a striking bust of King Charles the 
Martyr, and underneath the single cabalistic 
word: "Remember!" 

The Isle of Wight has many popular coast 
villages. Ryde is a modern seaside resort, 
full of interest and beauty. Sandown has a 
splendid beach and is another popular modern 
resort. Ventnor is unique. It is exquisitely 
beautiful and consists mostly of terraces on 
the great flowery cliff-side, all the way down 
to the sea. It has a sparkling cascade that 
tumbles down the cliff, and fine bathing on its 
beautiful beach. At the quaint inn called 
The Crab and Lobster, we enjoyed one 
of the most toothsome luncheons in all Eng- 
land, with the finest lobster imaginable. 

115 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Strange, what a vivid impression such an ex- 
perience can make! 

Shanklin Village and Bonchurch are beau- 
tiful almost beyond imagination. They seem 
to have been created just to delight the eye. 
They have their uses, of course. But they are 
predominantly things of beauty, and joys for- 
ever. Bonchurch has a tiny little church, very 
ancient, embowered in vines and roses, dedi- 
cated to St. Boniface, — hence the name, — 
which has been popularly shortened. Here 
for long years the rector was the Rev. Will- 
iam Adams, author of the famous poem, "The 
Shadow of the Cross," and above his grave in 
the churchyard is an iron cross, so arranged 
that its shadow is continually cast upon his 
grave. In this churchyard also lies buried 
Carlyle's famous friend, John Sterling, whose 
biography he wrote. 

In Upper Bonchurch are the graves of 
Algernon Charles Swinburne, and others of 
his family, — for they were all identified with 
this parish of Bonchurch. Few pilgrims come 
to Swinburne's resting-place. Yet he was a 
real genius, a wonderful lover of beauty, but 
he rarely struck a large or virile note; he 
was not a helper of faith and holiness; and 

116 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

therefore, I think, he has not won the general 
love of mankind as Tennyson did. 

There are three great bays in the Isle of 
Wight that we loved to visit in the evening 
light, and each of them within easy walking 
distance from Tennyson's home. And Ten- 
nyson loved them all. One is Freshwater 
Bay, which he could see from his own win- 
dows; another is Totland Bay, on the other 
side of the tip of the island. I shall never 
forget the exquisite beauty of this inlet, as 
we sat on the cliff one summer evening, just 
as dusk was gathering, looking out toward 
Hurst Castle and the mainland of England. 
As the darkness deepened, here and there 
flashed out the lights from the vessels in the 
harbor, the lights of distant lighthouses, the 
far-off searchlights of battleships, and above 
us the many twinkling, lighted stars. 

But the greatest of these bays is Alum 
Bay, with its wonderful cliffs, the greatest 
chalk cliffs in all England; the jagged out- 
lines of the great rocks called the Needles, 
which jut up from the water like a line of 
sentinels, with huge bayonets uplifted, and the 
lighthouse at the point leading them on, as 
if a perpetual challenge to their hereditary 

117 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

enemies, France and Germany, just across 
the Channel; and then all around the beau- 
tiful downs, inclosing the heights of the bay, 
and covered with soft green bracken, wild 
flowers, furze, and the greatest quantities of 
intensely purple heather. It is a fascinating 
spot. And one wishes at times that he could 
stay there forever, in that perfumed air, that 
majestic landscape, and that wonderful 
stretch of the blue, blue sea. How many 
hundreds of times Tennyson has stood at this 
very point on the cliffs and looked out at this 
view, and refreshed his soul with the wonder 
of it all! 

The town of Freshwater is so called be- 
cause of the fresh springs of the Yar, a little 
stream which flows into the Channel at the 
ancient town of Yarmouth. Here the sea- 
farers, eastern-bound, found their first oppor- 
tunity of replenishing their empty barrels 
with fresh water. And the Needles, the most 
striking feature of the landscape, are the 
jagged rocks around which the storms of the 
centuries have broken, and here has been 
many a tragic shipwreck. The estate of Far- 
ringford once belonged to the Abbey of Quarr, 
or Lyra, one of the first Cistercian monasteries 

118 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

established in England, about the time of 
Henry I, and the gi'eat field called Maidens- 
croft meant the Virgin Mary's Field. 

But now let us wander along the wonder- 
ful lanes to Tennyson's own home at Fresh- 
water, called Farringford. The driving 
through all these country lanes is most charm- 
ing, — the scenery is as exquisite as anything 
we ever saw. The hedges, the flowers, the 
golden furze, and purple heather, the well- 
kept trees, the thatched cottages, the ideal 
little inns here and there with quaint names, 
such as "The Flower Pot" and "The Horse 
Shoe." It was a perfect morning, the dew on 
the grass, and the air fragrant, when our little 
pilgrimage came up the lane and entered Lord 
Tennyson's estate, armed with letters to the 
head gardener from Lord Tennyson himself, 
giving us the freedom of the place. It was 
a pleasant walk through the avenues of trees, 
up to the house itself, which is embowered 
in foliage. Indeed, Farringford lies hidden 
among the trees, almost as well concealed as 
a bird's nest. The old walls have ivy and 
magnolia clambering over them, and so pic- 
turesque and beautiful is it that it seems a 
fitting hearth and home for a great poet. 

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THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Farringford is an old name and an old 
estate. Tennyson had deeds of it from the 
fourteenth century, signed by Walter de Far- 
ringford. Tennyson was forty-four years old 
when he came to settle down in what he called 
his wilderness of Farringford. He had been 
made poet laureate three years previously, but 
he was still a comparative stranger to the 
general public, and the income from his writ- 
ings was very slender, but it is interesting to 
remember that this splendid place was largely 
paid for from the proceeds of the poem of 
"Maud." Here at Farringford he was to 
live and work for forty years, and to build 
an incomparable palace of art by his poems, 
as well as win an undying and world-wide 
fame. 

The poet's home, we thought, had an eccle- 
siastical look, especially on the side not often 
seen in photographs. There were Tudor win- 
dows on the second floor, where the poet had 
made an addition to the old house, of a story 
for children's rooms and schoolroom which had 
not at all detracted from the picturesqueness 
of the place The house is quaint and inter- 
esting, not at all pretentious, yet with a noble 
dignity about it. 

120 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

We peeked into the drawing-room, whose 
windows gave a fine view of Freshwater Bay, 
and other windows that look out on the gar- 
dens with the yew trees and the wonderful 
cedar of Lebanon. In this drawing-room we 
saw life-size oil portraits of the present Lord 
and Lady Tennyson, with a magnificent por- 
trait of the poet Tennyson between them. 
There were bookcases built into the walls, 
with brass wire screen fronts. In the library 
was a striking bust of Dante, and over the 
mantel were the statuettes of three great 
poets, Chaucer, Shakespeare and, if I remem- 
ber rightly, Spenser. Photogi-aphs of Ten- 
nyson's friends were grouped around the 
wall, among whom I recognized Carlyle and 
Jowett, Watts, and Gladstone. 

The music-room was full of books and 
pictures, and a great piano. This music-room, 
or as it is sometimes called, the ballroom, was 
used as a playroom in the earlier days. It 
was a place full of joyful reminiscences for 
the Tennyson boys. Here oftentimes in the 
old days the poet played battledore and shut- 
tlecock with his two boys, built them mighty 
castles of bricks, read and told stories to them, 
and repeated many a stirring ballad. Ten- 

121 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

nyson was a true child-lover as well as a de- 
voted father. 

Tennyson's old study had been a little 
room at the top of the house in what was prac- 
tically the third story. The later study or 
library was on the second floor, the upper 
room in the west wing, a fine large room with 
bay windows looking out upon the lawn. The 
room is much the same as when the poet was 
living. It has the same furniture, the same 
pictures on the walls, and a large writing table 
in the bay window, where he wrote the later 
"Idylls" and other poems. The whole room 
is marked by simplicity in its furnishings, for 
Tennyson disliked luxury of any kind. He 
himself always chose the chair with the hardest 
seat and the straightest back. 

Half a century ago Prince Albert paid 
his only visit to Farringford. At the time the 
family was in the throes of moving, and the 
Memoir describes how the books were being 
sorted and arranged, all imaginable things 
strewn over the dining-room floor, and the 
chairs and tables in wild disarray. There 
was the same royal kind of welcome when we 
paid our visit. The house was being dis- 
mantled for the summer, and was in the hands 

122 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

of cleaners and painters, so that it was im- 
possible to see it as we might have wished. 
We had merely glimpses of it, but enough 
to realize something of its charm and some- 
thing of the beautiful atmosphere of this ideal 
home of the poet. You may remember Miss 
Thackeray's description of it. She calls it 
"a charmed palace with green walls without, 
and speaking walls within." And so it was. 

The poets of the past seemed to preside 
over the home. They were its Lares and 
Penates. Beautiful scenes from Italy and 
Greece looked out from the paintings on the 
walls; friends' faces lined the passages and 
the rooms; the choicest of books and treas- 
ures of ancient times filled the bookshelves, — 
a glow of witchery seemed everywhere. 

But that little old den at the top of the 
house was somehow the most sacred room of 
all. Tennyson used to call it "his little fumi- 
tory," and here he was wont to play on his 
sacred pipes, as he smilingly called them, smok- 
ing them for half an hour after breakfast and 
half an hour after dinner, when no one was 
allowed to be with him ; for then, as he always 
declared, his best thoughts came to him. Here 
for instance, he worked at "Maud," morning 

123 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

and evening, sitting in his hard high-backed 
wooden chair in this little room at the top of 
the house. On some rare and unusual occasion 
a visitor might be invited to this tiny sanctuary, 
even at the sacred hour. Phillips Brooks vis- 
ited the poet here in 1883, and he wrote of the 
place, "The house is a delightful old ram- 
bling thing whose geography one never learns ; 
not elegant but very comfortable, covered 
with pictures inside and ivies outside, with 
superb ilexes and other trees, and lovely views 
over the Channel. Tennyson," continues 
Phillips Brooks, "was inclined to be mis- 
anthropic at first, but after a time grew cheer- 
ful. We went up to his study, a big bright 
crowded room where he wrote his 'Idylls.' 
After dinner, we went up to the study again, 
for two or three hours, and smoked and 
talked. Then he was gentle, reverent, tender, 
and hopeful. He read aloud to us in the din- 
ing-room, 'Locksley Hall,' 'Sir Galahad,' and 
'Maud.' " It must have been rare converse 
and rare companionship when these two great 
souls joined company. 

To this little study Charles Kingsley was 
once admitted, and talked on all sorts of 
topics, "walking up and down for hours, 

124 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

smoking furiously, and affirming that tobacco 
was the only thing which kept his nerves 
quiet." The walls of this little room still seem 
to be redolent with the echoes of the talk of 
scholars and poets, scientists and divines. 
Such men as the artists Watts and Millet, the 
divines Dr. Martineau, F. D. Maurice, and 
Benjamin Jowett; such scientists as Tyndall, 
Owen and Darwin, and many others who 
were his great and noble friends. Most of 
all we can still seem to hear in this little 
room the deep, resonant tones of the poet 
himself, when he was reading aloud to his 
friends some of his own marvelous creations. 

This old study is now kept as a bedroom. 
It was not used as a workroom by the poet 
for some years before his death. Neverthe- 
less, the little room with its one window look- 
ing out upon the lawn is the most sacred 
shrine of the house. Here the spirit of the 
poet seems to brood in its fullness, and here 
great memories seem to gather most lovingly. 

The poem "Maud" that paid for Farring- 
ford was fiercely and persistently criticised. 
It was called Mud and Madness. But the 
power and passion of the poem sold it in spite 
of the critics, and it ran into edition after 

125 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

edition. The first four "Idylls of the King" 
were also written in this idyllic home, and they 
met with a large response from the reading 
public. Ten thousand copies were sold in 
the first week. A few years later "Enoch 
Arden" was published, and sixty thousand 
were sold in a very short time. From this 
date everything that Tennyson wrote was 
eagerly sought after, and his fame brought 
him ample means. 

It is a pleasant picture that we have of his 
life. His habits were most regular here in 
his island home. He lived quietly and mod- 
estly. Every morning after breakfast he 
climbed to his attic room and worked, or part 
of the time he composed in the open air, under 
the trees or in the meadow. The afternoons 
he gave to long walks or drives, and every 
evening after dinner to reading and writing. 

From his study window and from the draw- 
ing-room windows could be seen glimpses of 
the sea, and this meant so much to the 
poet. He loved the sea. Sometimes he 
seemed to feel the spirit of the old Norseman 
within him; perhaps something of this strain 
of blood had descended to him through the 
Danes of old Lincolnshire. He had loved 

126 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

the sea from his boyhood days in Lineohi- 
shire. These study windows at Farringford 
were a great solace to him because they com- 
manded the sea, and at his later home, the Sur- 
rey home at Aldworth, one thing that delighted 
him was that from those inland heights on 
Blackdown he could still get one gray glimpse 
of the sea. Remember his sea poems, such as 
"Enoch Arden," "Ulysses," "The Revenge," 
"The Sailor Boy," "Sea-dreams," "Break, 
Break, Break!" and many others, ending with 
that memorable swan-song, "Crossing the 
Bar." He was a lover of the sea all his life 
long. 

We loitered on the lawn for a long time, 
imder the favorite trees of the poet. We were 
especially interested in the old yew trees, 
recalling his lines in "The Holy Grail," 

"Oh, brother, I have seen this yew tree smoke 
Spring after spring for half a hundred years." 

There were also wonderful specimens of 
pine trees, elms, chestnuts, ilexes, and cedars 
of Lebanon on this lawn. Garibaldi planted 
a tree here in 1864, a Welling tonia gigantea, 
a tree which is still growing vigorously. Dr. 
Oliver Wendell Holmes visited the poet here 

127 



THROUGH EJTGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

in June, 1886, and was deeply interested in 
these trees. "Tennyson was then seventy- 
seven years old, but he was delighted," writes 
Dr. Holmes, "in pointing out to me the finest 
and rarest of his trees, and there were many 
beauties among them. In the Isle of Wight," 
continues Dr. Holmes, "there is a lavish ex- 
travagance of greenery." But he adds with 
a sigh after his visit: "I am sorry I did not 
ask Tennyson to read some of his poems 
to me." 

We sat down under the great yew tree on 
this dewy morning, looking out through the 
trees to Freshwater Bay, and the Lady read 
aloud, while the little Laddies sat at her feet, 
parts of "The Holy Grail" and "Maud," and 
parts of the "In Memoriam," especially the 
prelude, which had been written in this charm- 
ing spot. We were all alone except for the 
poet's mystic presence. 

We thought much of the dear lady who 
had for so many years presided in this home 
at Farringford. Those who know best say 
that no man ever had a nobler helpmate than 
Tennyson had in his wife. Delicate in health 
and for very many years an entire invalid. 
Lady Tennyson devoted herself entirely to 

128 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

her husband and her family; sharing the 
great responsibilities of his position; laboring 
early and late for him and for her children, 
and giving by the grace of her personality 
so much of peace and happiness to her home. 
The poet wrought out his poems alone, but 
when a poem was completed he always 
brought it to read and discuss with her, for 
she had a very discerning sympathy and fine 
judgment. She dealt with her husband's 
enormous correspondence, and was all her life 
an active center in the social life of her house, 
a most gracious hostess even to the humblest 
visitor. 

Mrs. Bradley, the wife of the Dean of 
Westminster, once wrote, "Those evenings 
when the poet, sitting in his old oak armchair 
after dinner in the drawing room, talked of 
what was in his heart, or read some poem 
aloud with the landscape lying before us, like 
a beautiful picture, framed in the dark arched 
bow window, are never to be forgotten." 

The head gardener of Farringford, Mr. 
Russell, was very kind to us, in the way of 
showing us all that he could. Lord Hallam 
Tennyson was still at Aldworth for the sum- 
mer. He usually leaves Farringford for three 

129 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

months each year and returns about the end 
of September. But he had sent word to this 
faithful old man, who had been with the 
Tennysons for forty-nine years, to do the 
honors for us. He took us into the beautiful 
garden, where there grew daffodils, snowdrops, 
and violets in beautiful profusion. Tenny- 
son had a great tenderness for all animals 
and even for all life. He disliked to cut 
flowers; he never destroyed anything that 
grew if he could possibly avoid it. He was 
always encouraging more growths; he loved 
to plant trees, and as for the animals, he al- 
lowed no traps or guns on his estate. The 
rabbits used to overrun the lawn. But he 
loved all these little wild creatures, and tried 
to make friends with them. 

"The present Lord Tennyson was only a 
boy of ten when I first came here," said the 
old gardener. "I am seventy-one now." He 
took us to a sheltered lawn near the house, 
a lawn inclosed by great trees. "This is 
where the poet used to work," he said, "with 
his table set right here. He would recite his 
lines and then write them down at this table. 
And then talk them out again, and write 
them down again. And if any one came near, 

130 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

he would withdraw quickly. We use this 
lawn as a tennis court now." 

We stood on Tennyson's bridge, a most 
picturesque rustic bridge across a deep lane 
that goes underneath. It spans a deep cutting, 
through which the public has the right of 
way. The bridge was an ingenious device 
of Tennyson's to secure privacy for himself 
in his garden, while at the same time adhering 
to the letter of the law. This bridge was a 
favorite spot with the poet. 

We went to Maiden's Croft, a beautiful 
meadow on the estate. It was christened with 
this name by the monks, who owned the place 
until the fourteenth century. Here in this 
meadow Tennyson built a summer house within 
which "Enoch Arden" and "The Holy Grail" 
came into being. It looks off to the sea at 
Freshwater Bay, and also toward the downs. 
He designed and had built and painted him- 
self this quaint little inn of poesy. He 
wrote "Enoch Arden" in about a fortnight, 
pacing up and down in this meadow, looking 
off to tlie sea and the downs, reciting his lines 
out loud and then writing them down in his 
manuscript book on the table in the little 
summer house. We looked into that quaint 

131 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

structure with a great deal of interest. He 
had stained the windows of it with his own 
design, painting on them marvelous dragons 
and sea-serpents. 

The life of the poet at Farringford was 
essentially an out-of-door life. The children 
were in the open air from daylight to dark, 
and Tennyson sat much in the garden or on 
the lawn, or went for long drives. The poet 
himself every day went for solitary tramps 
along the lanes, or over the downs, or by the 
seashore, — no matter what the weather might 
be. It was a life lived much with Nature, 
although there were the regular hours of or- 
dered and methodical work, and the hours also 
given up to intercourse with friends. 

Tennyson loved to talk with his neighbors, 
and was greatly liked by them for his kind- 
ness and sympathy. He loved to talk to old 
men at work in the fields, about death and 
the immortality of the soul, and he had many 
genuine sincere friendships with men of the 
common people. He was sincerely interested 
in them, and some of the working people have 
been among his most appreciative readers. 

He knew the name of nearly every flower 
and plant that grew on his land, or in the 

132 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

meadows or lanes about the island. If he 
happened to find any strange plant, it was 
his habit to look it up immediately in his 
botany book. In the same careful way he 
used to study the stars, and read up on the 
latest discoveries of the astronomers, so that 
his metaphors drawn from Nature and science 
are wonderfully accurate. 

The attitude of the poet toward Nature is 
admirably told by his son in these words: 
"Everywhere throughout the universe the poet 
saw the glory and greatness of God, and the 
science of Nature was particularly dear to 
him. Every new fact which came within his 
range was carefully weighed; as he exulted 
in the wilder aspects of Nature and reveled 
in the thunderstorm, so he felt a joy in her 
orderliness ; he felt a rest in her steadfastness, 
patient progress, and hopefulness; the same 
seasons ever returned; the same stars wheeled 
in their courses; the flowers and trees blos- 
somed and the birds sang yearly in their ap- 
pointed months, and he had a triumphant 
appreciation of her ever new revelation of 
beauty." 

He built in the kitchen garden a little sum- 
merhouse for his wife, which he called "a 

133 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

bower of rushes," and he used to love to work 
in this garden; he swept the lawns, he grav- 
eled the walks himself, and he loved to think 
that its fine old walls had stood there since 
the days when the monks of Lyra Abbey had 
walked there. 

It was, as the historian Lecky remarked, as 
if "Nature had evidently intended Tennyson 
for the life of the quietest and most secluded 
of country gentlemen, for a life spent among 
books and flowers and a few intimate friends, 
and very remote from the noise and contro- 
versy of the great world." And yet we all 
see there was infinitely more in the man and 
in his life than this. There was in him the 
old fire of the Viking, and the strength of the 
passionate lover of life and truth, and even 
at Farringford he lived a stern and strenuous 
life, battling for his ideals as valiantly as if 
his pen were a sword. His work is full of 
grace and beauty, but also full of strength 
and power, a simplicity and a sublimity about 
it which show that it is a man's work, valiant 
and true. 

Of one of the poems written here at 
Farringford, "The Holy Grail," his son 
says: "It seems to me to express most my 

134) 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

father's higher self. Perhaps this is because 
I saw him in the writing of this poem more 
than in the writing of any other, with that 
faraway rapt look on his face, which he had 
whenever he worked at a story that touched 
him greatly, or because I vividly recall the 
inspired way in which he chanted to us the 
different parts of the poem as they were com- 
posed." 

Concerning these "Idylls of the King," I 
wonder how much may be due, aside from the 
genius of his intellect, to the beauty and har- 
mony and ideal surroundings of the poet in 
his enchanting island-home. 

Tennyson had many favorite walks and 
drives in the neighborhood. He loved to go 
to Calbourne to see the huddling brook. He 
enjoyed driving by the old-world thatched cot- 
tages of Thorley and Wellow, and to Newton 
Creek; and often through the fishing hamlets 
on the southern coast of the island. He loved 
to visit Swainton, the home of his good friend 
Sir John Simeon. It was interesting to learn 
that the scene of the introduction to the poem 
of "The Princess" is this garden at Swain- 
ton, and Sir Arthur Vivian is none other than 
Sir John Simeon himself. 

135 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Tennyson's favorite walk in all the island, 
however, was along the crest of the mighty 
down, which is a part of his own estate, the 
finest chalk cliff in all England, and giving 
the most glorious view of the Needles. "Ours 
is the most noteworthy part of the island," 
Tennyson used to say, "and the air on this 
down is worth sixpence a pint." Near the 
foot of the down are some steps which were 
cut by Tennyson's own hand fifty years ago, 
to help his wife climb' to the heights and 
share with him this favorite walk. Those 
steps have thus become a place of gentle 
memory. 

Often when Hallam and Lionel were boys 
they were harnessed to a wheeled chair in 
which their mother was seated while the father 
pushed, and thus many an expedition was 
taken to the downs or the sea. 

The poet's favorite time for walking on 
the downs was in the late afternoon or even- 
ing, and best time of all in the moonlight. 
Bayard Taylor, our American poet and trav- 
eler, took this walk with him along the downs 
to the Needles on a June afternoon in 
1857. Years later our American publisher 
and author, James T. Fields, visited the poet 

136 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

and walked the downs with him in the moon- 
light. He tells how at one point Tennyson 
suddenly dropped on his knees in the grass, 
and on Mr. Fields asking what was the mat- 
ter, the poet called out, "Violets, man, violets, 
smell them and you'll sleep the better!" He 
had a most exquisite sense of smell and a 
great delight in violets. In all weathers he 
loved to walk over these wonderful downs and 
headlands, for he loved to listen to the cease- 
less pulsing of the sea and the moaning of 
the great wind. 

He went forth clad in his great cloak, soft 
hat, and with his favorite dog by his side. 
His niece relates that once walking with him 
on this down he said to her, "If I did not 
believe that God was with me day by day, 
just as plainly as you are by my side, I do 
not see how I could live." 

So our little pilgrimage party with the 
spirit of the great poet in our hearts walked 
with him up his favorite path, along the 
downs, and up to the heights where stands 
the lofty beacon now his special memorial 
on this great cliff which is to be forever called 
Tennyson's Down and the Tennyson Beacon. 
The beacon is a fine Celtic cross beautifully 

137 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

proportioned, and carved on it is this in- 
scription; "In memory of Alfred, Lord 
Tennyson, this cross is raised, a beacon to 
sailors, by the people of Freshwater and 
other friends in England and America." 

The cliffs in places are dazzling white 
under the gleam of the sun, and sometimes 
jagged and beautiful, like a row of tiger's 
teeth. There is a niche in the cliff side which 
was pointed out as a favorite resting-place of 
the poet's. Here he was accustomed to sit, 
sheltered from the cold winds, gazing out sea- 
ward. 

Now and then as we were climbing the 
heights we could almost see before us the 
tall figure of the poet in his black wideawake 
hat, and the short blue cape with velvet col- 
lar, "the face with its noble refinement and 
power, and the dark, melancholy eyes look- 
ing far into the distance over the sea." Far 
down below we could hear what the poet has 
heard and described in his great vivid way, 

"The scream of a madden'd beach, dragg'd down by the 
wave." 

Here on this beacon height we obtained 
our finest view of the island, — the great pre- 

138 




THE TENNYSON BEACON. 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

cipitous chalk cliffs on the ocean side, and 
on the other side the broad outlook over the 
whole island, the beautifully wooded island- 
kingdom, with the towering castle in its very 
center, and the glimmering sea on all sides, 
and distant glimpses of the mainland of Eng- 
land. Here we sat alone, on the grass at the 
foot of the beacon. No other visitors were 
even in sight, — no other signs of life, except 
a few sheep which were grazing here and there 
on the downs. Occasionally came the harsh 
calling of the gulls from the cliffs far below, 
or the muffled booming of the heavy surf on 
the shingles, a thousand feet below us. 

Here in the radiant sunshine we read aloud, 
twice over, "Crossing the Bar," looking out to 
the sea and up into the open heavens. And 
here we read, three times over, that wonder- 
ful poem of "The Higher Pantheism," so 
that its deep and lofty meaning might sink 
into our souls. It had been a consecration 
and a benediction to visit the poet's home. 
Here we seemed to enter into something of 
the poet's solitude and grandeur. 

As Auerbach says in his wonderful story, 
"On the heights there is repose." We love 
to think of Tennyson in that green court 

139 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

yonder, dreaming his dreams and making his 
lines portraying in such a wonderful way the 
great pictures that his soul conjured up, and 
then coming out here along these majestic 
cliffs by the illimitable sea, up to this very 
beacon height, where he found broad expanse, 
infinite vision, and new strength of soul, where 
he beheld the whole world, — and God. This 
was his great vision in "The Higher Pan- 
theism" : 

"The sun, the moon, the stars, the seas, the hills and 
the plains — 
Are not these, O Soul, the Vision of Him who reigns? 

"Is not the Vision He? tho' He be not that which He 
seems ? 
Dreams are true while they last, and do we not live 
in dreams? 

"Earth, these solid stars, this weight of body and limb. 
Are they not sign and symbol of thy division from 
Him? 

"Dark is the world to thee: thyself art the reason why: 
For is He not all but that which has power to feel 
'I am I'? 

"Glory about thee, without thee: and thou fulfillest thy 
doom. 
Making Him broken gleams, and a stifled splendor and 
gloom. 

140 



FARRINGFORD AND THE ISLE OF WIGHT 

"Speak to Him thou, for He hears, and Spirit with 
Spirit can meet — • 
Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands 
and feet. 

"God is law, say the wise: O Soul, and let us rejoice. 
For if He thunder by law, the thunder is yet His voice. 

"Law is God, say some; no God at all, says the fool; 
For all we have power to see is a straight staff bent 
in a pool; 

"And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man 
cannot see; 
But if we could see and hear, this Vision — were it 
not He?" 



141 



X 

ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

TENNYSON'S palatial home in the 
hills of Surrey is on Blackdown near 
Haslemere. It is a noble situation for 
a home, commanding a magnificent view of 
all the country round, and giving "one gray 
glimpse of the sea" on a clear day. But the 
place was selected especially on account of 
the bracing air, which the poet's wife needed. 
The fine qualities of the atmosphere of this 
region were first made known by the scientist 
John Tyndall, who pronounced it the most 
salubrious spot in England. In more recent 
years a colony of artists and literary people, 
realizing both the beauty and the healthful- 
ness of the place, have gathered in the neigh- 
borhood. 

There is a certain wild and rugged grandeur 
about Blackdown, "shaggy moorland every- 
where, with great patches of heather and 
heath, with masses of gorse growing rich in 

142 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

the sandy fertile soil." But it is the whole- 
someness of the air that is the chief attrac- 
tion. Here Birket Foster lived for many 
years, and George Eliot for a while. Here 
also came Mrs. Humphry Ward, Alma-Ta- 
dema, Hall Caine, and others. Haslemere 
village is mostly modern, with only a few 
survivals of the quaint old days, — some an- 
cient stone houses embowered in roses. 

The estate called Aldworth is two miles 
or more from the station by a most charming 
drive. We were told that the last portion of 
the drive would be on very high ground with 
extensive views, and the final half-mile would 
lead through a shady lane, called "Tennyson's 
Lane," with an overhanging colonnade of 
trees, and the entire length of it exquisitely 
mossy and sweet. 

So we climbed the large ascent of Black- 
down. We came to the height nine hundred 
feet above the sea. We found the air rare and 
fragrant with heather. We were delighted 
with Tennyson's Lane, an avenue of trees 
meeting overhead and hedged with mossy 
banks of rhododendrons, bracken, and purple 
heather. Squirrels and rabbits and other 
woodland creatures dart across the path. The 

143 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

lane twists and turns in most picturesque 
fashion, and seems to lead nowhere in par- 
ticular, except out into a moor. But over 
that moorland one may see a white gate, and 
this leads to the enchanted land. And here 
we entered. 

We need not compare Farringford and 
Aldworth. Each has its own special charm 
and delight. Farringford rests in the bosom 
of the Isle of Wight, with the surging of the 
sea all around it and a wonderful growth of 
flowers and plants. Aldworth nestles high in 
the heart of a rich inland country, five and 
twenty miles from the coast. Its air, although 
strong and bracing, has a softness like velvet, 
and its high moors are knee-deep in a lux- 
uriance of purple heather. 

Tennyson was sixty years old when he built 
Aldworth. He never forsook Farringford, 
and up to the last the winters were usually 
spent in the Isle of Wight; but at Aldworth 
he passed the summers. The poet described 
this great weald of Sussex in his prologue to 
"The Charge of the Heavy Brigade," as fol- 
lows: 

"Our birches yellowing and from each 
The light leaves falling fast 

144 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

While squirrels from our fiery beech 
Were bearing off the mast. 

"You came and look'd and lov'd the view. 
Long known and loved by me, 
Green Sussex fading into blue, 
With one gray glimpse of sea." 

This "one gray glimpse of sea" is at the 
point where there is an opening in the South 
Downs at Arundel. Aldworth is on the 
southern slope of the downs. It commands 
a magnificent view of wide open country. 
The down itself is thickly covered with 
bracken and gorse, whortleberry and purple 
heather. The estate stands near the borders of 
three counties, Hampshire, Surrey, and Sus- 
sex, and even a good part of Kent can be 
seen from the height. 

It was my privilege to be invited to this 
beautiful home at Aldworth by Lord and 
Lady Tennyson, and to spend an ideal July 
day enjoying their gracious hospitality. 

Lady Tennyson has a very sweet and at- 
tractive face, and simple, unaffected manners. 
Lord Tennyson is a fine, portly gentleman 
of, I should judge, sixty years of age. He 
has a spare, reddish beard, kindly eyes, and 
seemed to me to have at times the look of his 

145 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

father. He was most pleasant, sympathetic, 
and affable. One of his good friends who 
knows him well says, "He is a great, broad- 
shouldered, genial Englishman, he speaks few 
words, but pithy, and possesses a personality 
at once strong, kindly, and winning." This re- 
minds one of what Francis Turner Palgrave 
said of the elder Tennyson, "The one impres- 
sion which above all others those three and 
forty years of unswerving friendship have left 
with me as the dominant note of Alfred Ten- 
nyson, is lovableness." And so I found the 
son. 

Lord Tennyson is a quiet, sensible talker, 
keen and clear. A few bits of the conversa- 
tion may be of interest. 

"I remember Oliver Wendell Holmes' 
visit," said Lord Tennyson. "He was de- 
lightful. His is a finer humor than that of 
Mark Twain, who was rather heavy-handed 
for me. Dr. Holmes is deservedly popular in 
England." 

"I heard Phillips Brooks quite by accident 
at Westminster Abbey. I had never heard or 
seen him before. I listened in amazement. 
That's a remarkable man, I said. So I got 
introduced by the Dean — Stanley, it was, — 

146 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

and brought him home with me. He told 
me he would like to live five hundred years, 
— he enjoyed life so." 

He had just been reading Mary Johnston's 
novel, "The Long Roll." He thought Lee 
a magnificent man, and greatly admired 
Stonewall Jackson. 

I asked about the incident when his father 
had almost come to America in 1880. "Yes," 
he answered, "I tried to get berths on several 
lines, but couldn't. I wish he had gone. The 
sea voyage would have done him good, and 
he would have been delighted with some of 
the great sights of America. 

"No, I have never been to America myself, 
but I would love to come over to Canada and 
the States, and am hoping to, some day." 

After luncheon, Lord Tennyson took me 
through the house to see some of his father's 
special relics. First into the hall, which is 
lofty and spacious, extending the whole 
length of the building and looking out at 
each end on the green lawns and the waving 
trees, so that the fragrance of the gardens is 
wafted all summer through the whole house. 

"Here is a row of my father's friends," 
he said. On the wall were large photographs 

147 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

of the portraits by George Frederick Watts, — 
Herschel, Benjamin Jowett, Browning, Car- 
lyle, and others. In the hall, there were 
statues of Tennyson, such as those in Trinity 
College at Cambridge and in the National 
Portrait Gallery in London. 

In the hall I noticed a picture by Edward 
Lear of a knight in armor in the desert, an 
illustration of the lines in Tennyson's poem, 
"The Palace of Art": 

"One seem'd all dark and red, — a tract of sand 
And some one pacing there alone 
Who paced forever in a glimmering land 
Lit with a low, large moon." 

Edward Lear, we learned, was an intimate 
friend of the poet's. On the wall are also 
mezzotints by Holbein and others. There 
were numerous portraits of Tennyson him- 
self, and these gave a sense of his presence 
in the house. 

The middle room has a bay window, where 
after dinner dessert was spread, and usually 
the family and guests would here spend a 
pleasant half hour with the poet before he re- 
tired to his study to work. In this room were 
paintings of the two children, Hallam and 
Lionel, painted by Watts and presented by 

US 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

him to the family, and also that exquisite 
painting of Lady Tennyson, so ethereal that 
it looks like an angel, — full of tenderness 
and spirituality and yet showing wonderful 
strength of character. Her son pays a beau- 
tiful tribute to this ideal mother when he 
says, writing of what she was to his father, 
"By her quiet sense of humor, by her selfless 
devotion, by her faith as clear as the heights 
of the June blue heavens, she helped him to 
the utmost in the hours of his depression and 
of his sorrow." 

As we went up the stairway to the library. 
Lord Tennyson pointed out on the walls a 
great collection of weapons, spears, and 
shields, swords and axes, covering a whole 
side of the stairway. "These weapons are 
still used in Australia. I collected them when 
I was Governor- General of Australia, a few 
years ago." 

Lord Tennyson, like his father, is a devotee 
of the sacred pipes, and after a meal there 
is a half hour of coffee and smoke and chat 
in the library. 

This library is one of the most interesting 
rooms in the house. We entered by a Gothic 
oak door, passing through a screened portion 

149 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

of the room, which is ornamented with large 
medalKons of the Roman emperors, probably 
ten or fifteen of them. "This is my father's 
study," said Lord Tennyson, "I keep the 
room just as he left it. This is his chair and 
desk; these pictures were his; this is the only 
new one that I have added." 

I found pictures and books everywhere; the 
study wall is almost covered with pictures. 
The chairs and couch are upholstered with a 
red-and-white-figured chintz, the ceiling is 
timbered by light beams and crossed squares. 

"This ivy wreath," continued Lord Tenny- 
son, "was sent by Queen Victoria for his fu- 
neral, and this great pall, hanging over the 
screen, was the one that was placed over his 
coffin at Westminster Abbey. It was em- 
broidered by the Needle Guild of Keswick, 
and you will notice it has a verse of 'Crossing 
the Bar' embroidered upon it." 

Here at this table in the study, Tennyson 
wrote many of his later works, and especially 
his dramas, such as "Queen Mary," "Becket," 
and "Harold," into which he threw such splen- 
did energy even in his advancing years. It 
was in his eighty-first year that one of the 
most perfect of his poems, "Crossing the Bar," 

150 




PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON BY SAMUEL LAURENCE. 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

was written on one of his journeys from / 
Aldworth to Farringford, perhaps suggested 
by the crossing of the narrow channel to his 
island home. 

I noticed that in this study was Watts' por- 
trait of Tennyson, similar to the one in Trinity 
College, Cambridge, — ''a most excellent like- 
ness," said Lord Tennyson. Also a replica by 
Watts of the one in the National Portrait 
Gallery. "Not so good," said his lordship. 
In this room is the earliest sketch of him 
by Mr. Wells, when he was twenty-three 
years old, and also the latest portrait, one 
by Watts, the grand and shadowy one in 
crayon that makes him look like Merlin him- 
self. Lord Tennyson likes the boyish portrait 
of his father, painted by Laurence when the 
poet was twenty-nine. It shows a smooth and 
beardless face, but it is already marked with 
lines of thought, and gives the broad, mas- 
sive forehead, prophetic of the future "dome 
of thought" which Tennyson's noble head 
suggested. "The portrait by My ell, the beard- 
ed portrait," says Lord Tennyson, "is just as 
my father used to look." 

But his favorite picture of his father is that 
of 1859 by Watts, — the portrait now owned 

151 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

by Lady Henry Somerset, of Arundel Cas- 
tle. "This portrait I like very much," he 
said, "I consider it the best of all. It reveals 
the poet perfectly." 

There are magnificent views from the win- 
dows of this study or library. "It is the finest 
view in England," exclaimed his lordship. 

The conversation in the library ran on 
books and poems. He had just been read- 
ing the first volume of the new Life of Dis- 
raeli and wondered when the second volume 
would be issued. "It is probably rather slow 
work," he remarked, "getting it out, as so 
many people are yet alive, who are involved in 
its pages, that it makes it difficult to write. 
But it is a splendid sketch of Dizzy," he ex- 
claimed; "what a romantic career he had! He 
was hated and despised and yet he reached the 
heights." 

I thanked him for his own recent three vol- 
umes, the two volumes of Memoirs of his 
father's life and the more recent volume of 
tributes of his father's friends which he edited, 
and I ventured the remark, "You write so 
well in prose, do you ever venture into verse?" 
"Yes, sometimes," he answered. "And does it 
get into print?" I questioned further. "Yes, 

152 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

but not under my own name." And I won- 
dered who to-day in England is publishing 
verse in the Tennysonian style, and perhaps 
with a touch of the Tennysonian genius, which 
we have not yet recognized under its nom de 
plume. 

We talked much of the Arthurian legends, 
and especially of the attempts to identify 
Camelot. "Camelot," he concluded, "better 
think of it as beneath the sea. The real site, 
if there ever was a real site, cannot now be 
determined. But Tintagel is a real place. 
Go visit that. The sea is so fine there, with 
its great waves and roaring caves under the 
cliffs. The ruins are not large; they may 
disappoint you, but they are real and grand. 
My father used to enjoy Tintagel so much." 
As we talked and looked out of these study 
windows, I thought how the great poet some- 
times looking out from these same study win- 
dows to the landscape, said that he had "won- 
derful thoughts about God and the universe 
and felt as if looking into the other world." 

Tennyson was a man of long silences and 
a lover of solitude. His son says that he was 
not infrequently abstracted for days while 
he was composing. This made him seem 

153 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

rather brusque to strangers. His very direct- 
ness and simplicity also caused him sometimes 
to be misunderstood. He had a gift of self- 
concentration, which often led him to avoid 
strangers and to eschew small talk, but to 
visitors in his own house he showed an ideal 
hospitality, with a most genial thoughtfulness 
and cordiality. 

I was told that Tennyson once read some of 
his poems into a phonograph which had been 
a special gift from its inventor, Edison, — 
such poems as "The Charge of the Heavy Bri- 
gade," "Maud," and "Break, Break, Break." 
I wonder if the public will ever be privileged 
to hear these phonographic records of the 
poet's voice that is now stilled forever? 

As we went out into the gardens and the 
terraces. Lord Tennyson pointed out the spe- 
cial flowers that his father loved. "Father 
and I planted all these trees; the tallest tree 
here represents only forty years. It was just 
a field when we came here." 

At the northeast corner of the terrace is a 
strong young oak tree, planted by Tennyson 
on Jubilee Day, 1887, when the poet wrote 
his "Ode on the Jubilee of Queen Victoria." 

Lord Hallam Tennyson walked through 
154 




LATEST PORTRAIT OF TENNYSON, BY WATTS. 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

these gardens wearing a great straw hat like 
a farmer's hat, and two dogs jumped and 
gamboled at his side. He pointed out the 
motto that ran in interwoven carvings around 
the house, "Gloria Deo in excelsis," etc. "My 
mother and father designed the house," he 
said, "and Mr. James Knollys, the architect, 
put it in working shape for them. What style 
would you call the house? Perhaps French 
chateau in part and Tudor in part; some say 
it should have been all Tudor, but it cost 
enough as it was." 

The name "Aldworth" is taken from one of 
the old Sellwood places belonging to Lady 
Tennyson's family. The residence is not a 
large house, and the estate consists of about 
one hundred and fifty acres. There is a for- 
mal garden and a much larger wild-garden 
which Tennyson especially loved. Lord Ten- 
nyson gave me several sprays of the Alexan- 
drian laurel, the poet's laurel, which was a 
special favorite of his father, and a wreath of 
which was laid upon his coffin at the funeral. 

Several distinct lawns extend around the 
house, each surrounded by birch, yew, ilex, 
pines, fir and cypress, making pleasant green 
parlors of the sward. There is one circle of 

155 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

trees around the lawn, that makes a beautiful 
little open-air theater, and here often the fam- 
ily have their tea al fresco. 

"The view from these terraces at sunset," 
said Lady Tennyson, "is wonderfully grand. 
And at night, from this point, we can often 
get a glimpse of the sea when the moon is just 
right. We can see it glimmering and shim- 
mering on the water." 

Aldworth is exquisitely beautiful. As Ar- 
thur Patterson puts the comparison, "Far- 
ringford was a place of promise and of great- 
ness to be, while at Aldworth there is an 
atmosphere of stately maturity and of the 
promise that had been fulfilled. Farringford, 
the old home, was a place that had grown; 
Aldworth has been built. Each is perfect of 
its kind, each has an especial charm, and both 
breathe the personality of the master-spirit 
that has lived in them." 

"Farringford he never forsook," writes 
Aubrey De Vere, "though he added Aldworth 
to it, and assuredly no poet has ever before 
called two such residences his own. The sec- 
ond house was as well chosen as the first. It 
lifted England's great poet to a height from 
which he could gaze on a large portion of that 

156 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

English land he loved so well, see it basking 
in its most affluent summer beauty, and only 
bounded by the inviolate sea. Year after 
year he trod its two stately terraces, with men 
the noblest of their time." 

The guests at Aldworth included some of 
the best-known names in England, and Ten- 
nyson, being, as Laureate, a member of the 
Royal Household, sometimes had several of 
the Royal Family on special visits to him. The 
Princess Mary, the Duchess of Teck, and the 
Duchess of Albany have walked with him on 
the terraces of his Aldworth home. Gladstone 
has been here, the Duke of Argyle, Lord 
Wolseley, Lord Napier, Lord and Lady Duf- 
ferin, and many others. 

Tennyson was a devoted walker and an en- 
thusiastic dog lover. His dear old Don was 
a constant companion for him in his walks 
over hill and dale. They would tramp to- 
gether, not caring if the weather were fair or 
foul. Near Blackdown House, a fine old 
Elizabethan mansion where Cromwell once 
slept, was a favorite resting-place on his walks, 
called by Tennyson "the Temple of the 
Winds." It is a clump of fir trees with a 
great panorama stretching before it. 

157 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Tennyson always paused on his walks to 
hear the trickle of a stream, and sometimes, as 
his son tells, would stand a long while leaning 
on his stick thinking. All sounds of running 
water had an especial charm for him. 

As he grew older, his walks gradually grew 
shorter, and he spent more time in the sunset 
arbor and the eastern arbor of his gardens, 
sitting in one or the other according to the 
direction of the wind, but to the very last he 
kept up one walk daily, and that was along 
the lane toward Haslemere, that lane now 
called Tennyson's Lane, to a gate about three 
quarters of a mile from the house, where he 
would always strike the gatepost with his stick 
before he turned back. His regular methods 
of work and his open-air life kept him hale 
and hearty to the age of eighty-three. 

One thing that especially impressed me in 
Tennyson's home at Aldworth was that fine 
old Welsh motto that he loved, and which was 
put into the tiles of his entrance hall, as Lord 
Tennyson pointed out to me, — the motto: 
*'Y Gwir yn erbyn y byd," which means in 
English, "The Truth, against the World." 
Somehow the heroic challenge in that motto 
pleased Tennyson greatly, for he felt all his 

168 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

life long that he was fighting for the stronger 
faith and for the larger truth. His poems 
agree with the latest findings of science, and 
yet they are full of the worthiest thoughts of 
God. He felt himself a prophet in his own 
day and generation, — to proclaim to the world 
a reconciling word between science and relig- 
ion, and his message was splendidly uttered 
and is being increasingly heard as the years 
go on. 

We had saved for the last hour a visit to 
the upper chamber where the great Poet 
Laureate had breathed his last. It is now 
Lady Tennyson's own room, and I was taken 
into it by her who had had such an intimate 
share in the benediction of those last hours. 
It is a beautiful room, with its casement win- 
dows looking out over magnificent hills, and 
much in it remains as it was. 

"It was two o'clock in the morning," said 
Lady Tennyson to me, describing that last 
scene; "the moonlight was streaming through 
this casement window. The bed was just as 
it is now, canopy and all; except that there 
were not so many trailing vines around 
the window as now; the view out of the win- 
dows was of course just the same. We could 

159 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

not quite glimpse the sea that night, but the 
poet's face was bathed in the Hght of the full 
harvest moon. He had been reading 'Cymbe- 
line' that last day. I was with him when he 
passed away. He looked out over that won- 
derful landscape for the last time, and in the 
moonlight and with his 'Cymbeline' he was so 
peaceful, content, and serene." 

He lay "a figure of breathing marble look- 
ing out upon the landscape that he loved," and 
there seemed to come the fulfillment of the 
lines — 

"Sunset and evening star 
And one clear call for me." 

Surely, I thought, this was a poetic exit to 
life, — and such a beautiful life, so large and 
majestic and well rounded. It is a consecra- 
tion to be in this room where the great poet 
breathed his last, and where he looked on the 
beautiful world for the last time. What a 
wonderful view of life he always had, and what 
visions of beauty and chivalry he brought to us 
all. How noble an interpreter! How great 
was his life, — full of years, honor, and splen- 
did service and at last to be laid to rest in the 
beauty of the Poets' Corner of Westminster 
Abbey, and always to be remembered and 

160 



ALDWORTH AMONG THE SURREY HILLS 

loved, — what more glorious career could a man 
ask? 

I shall never forget the story of that fu- 
neral procession from Aldworth down Tenny- 
son's Lane to Haslemere as his son described 
it. It was like a beautiful and touching poem 
in itself: "We placed 'Cymbeline' with him and 
a laurel wreath from Virgil's tomb, and 
wreaths of roses, the flower which he loved 
above all flowers, and some of the Alexandrian 
laurel, — the poet's laurel. On the evening of 
that day, the coffin was set upon a wagon- 
ette, made beautiful with stag's-horn moss, 
and the scarlet lobelia cardinalis, and draped 
with a pall woven by working men and women 
of the North, and embroidered by the cottagers 
of Keswick, and then we covered him with the 
wreaths and crosses sent from all parts of 
Great Britain. The coachman, who had been 
for more than thirty years my father's faith- 
ful servant, led the horse; ourselves, the vil- 
lagers, and the school children followed over 
the moor, through our lane, toward a glorious 
sunset, and later through Haslemere under 
brilliant starlight." 

And then finally came that wonderful fu- 
neral service in Westminster Abbey which in 

161 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

his son's very words, "was simple and majestic, 
and the tributes of sympathy which we received 
from many countries and from all creeds and 
classes were not only remarkable for their uni- 
versality, but for their depth of feeling; and 
for weeks after the funeral, multitudes passed 
by the new-made grave, in a never-ceasing 
procession." 

Surely it was all a most happy realization 
of the poet's ideal as he had expressed it in 
his own majestic requiem, his latest confes- 
sion of faith, his confident trust in the future, 
his perfect poem, "Crossing the Bar." 

"Sunset and evening star. 

And one clear call for me ! 
And may there be no moaning of the bar, 
When I put out to sea. 

"But such a tide as moving seems asleep. 
Too full for sound and foam, 
When that which drew from out the boundless deep 
Turns again home. 

"Twilight and evening bell. 
And after that the dark ! 
Anid may there be no sadness of farewell. 
When I embark: 

"For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place 
The flood may bear me far, 
I hope to see my Pilot face to face 
When I have crossed the bar." 

162 




POETS' CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY. 



XI 

TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

IN the cloudy evening light we climbed down 
into Tintagel Cove and looked up at the 
colossal cliffs where the ancient castle 
frowned, and listened to the mighty surf thun- 
dering on the shingly beach and booming its 
rough way into the depths of Merlin's Cave. 
The wind was blowing a stiff gale; the stone 
road and roughly chiseled steps were slippery 
with the recent rain. So we did not attempt 
that evening to scale the castle heights to the 
farthest reaches, — much to the chagrin of the 
Laddies, who in true American spirit were 
ready to risk all in the attempt. We did climb 
half-way up the heights. That seemed perilous 
enough for enjoyment, and we looked out to 
the south toward far-away Trevose. It was 
a magnificent view of the weird and wild Corn- 
ish coast, lashed by the great waves. 

The cliffs at Tintagel are among the highest 
and most impressive in Cornwall. Through 
their association with these ancient ruins of 

163 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

King Arthur's castle and the mystic legends 
of the past, these seashore precipices have be- 
come most fascinating and even sublime. 
Down in Tintagel Cove we talked with a ven- 
erable dame who was the custodian of the 
castle keys. She told us she had been born 
here in Tintagel, as were her mother and her 
grandmother before her. Her mother had 
seen the light in the little stone house, now a 
picturesque ruin a little way up the cove, and 
had always lived there, even to the green old 
age of eighty-four. Such romantic associa- 
tions ought to have brought something of 
grandeur into her soul. I wonder if it did. 

The dusk was falling rapidly and the heavy 
storm clouds were wrapping all things in 
gloom as we clambered up out of the valley 
toward the village and wandered on to our 
hotel. As we gave our last look at the castle, 
the ruins faded into the darkness and the storm 
broke. 

That night in King Arthur's Castle, as the 
hotel is named, we re-read the "Idylls of the 
King," especially "The Coming of Arthur" 
and "The Passing of Arthur," and we felt 
anew the witchery and the grandeur of the 
splendid story. In the hotel hall we were 

164 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

delighted to find a round table of King Arthur, 
made after the ancient one in the Great 
Hall at Winchester, with the names of Ar- 
thur's knights engraved upon it, — Sir Gala- 
had, Sir Lancelot, Sir Percival, and the others, 
— and the veritable painting of King Arthur 
himself in his royal robes as part of its decora- 
tion. This round table interested the Laddies 
at once, and they made rubbings of the carven 
names of some of the knights upon its edges. 

It gave a charming sense of reality to have 
the Lady seated at King Arthur's Round 
Table, reading to us those very legends of 
King Arthur's knights that had made this re- 
gion of Tintagel, and Camelot near by, and 
Lyonesse, and Caerleon-on-Usk so memorable 
in the ancient centuries of Britain. The storm 
that howled without and the gusts of rain 
against the window-panes only served to make 
these old legends more vivid to us, as they 
themselves had come from a stormy past. 

Bright and early the next morning, we 
looked out from our windows and there 
straight before us, — yes, it was not a mere 
dream of the night, — there were the immense 
cliffs and the ruined castle of King Arthur, 
and beyond the wide stretches of the illimitable 

165 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

sea. Again we clambered down the rocks into 
the Cove, by a zigzag pathway, and begged 
from the old custodian the key to the postern 
gate of the castle. We gave the ponderous 
key into the care of one of the Laddies, who 
deposited the trust in his safest pocket before 
we began the upward climb. We had heard 
that the old lady had several duplicates of 
the ancient key, so that we felt at ease in ac- 
cepting its precious custody. 

Before making the rocky ascent, however, 
we went down farther to the shingly beach, 
and visited some of the great caverns in the 
rocks. Wonderful is the so-called Merlin's 
Cave, which tunnels under the great cliff of 
the castle from one side to another. The sea 
at times of high tide rushes into both entrances. 
The cavern is colossal in size, perhaps forty 
feet in height and from ten to twenty feet 
wide, but in the middle of its course under 
the cliff it becomes so low that one has to stoop. 
From the depths of the cavern the outlook is 
magnificent, — from the darkness out into the 
light, from the awful stillness of the cave out 
to the roaring and rushing ocean. As we stood 
in the cavern's mouth and the mighty waves 
leaped and tumbled in majesty to our feet, 

166 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

we could easily believe in that wonderful old 
wizard Merlin, and that this very cavern might 
have been his hiding-place and the shrine of his 
magic art, beneath King Arthur's castle. The 
grandeur of the place, the loneliness and weird- 
ness of the scenery, give a strange sense of the 
uncanny and the unearthly, in which we are 
prepared to accept legend as fact and the 
weirdest tales as no stranger than the truth 
itself. 

Soon the Laddies and the Lady were lead- 
ing the pilgrim procession up the rocky stair- 
case to the heights. At the postern gate one 
Laddie, like another Merlin, produced the 
magic key, and we unlocked the heavy iron- 
bound gate, strangely marked with many 
wrought-iron hob-nails in ancient ornament, 
and in a moment we were within the castle 
inclosure. Backward through the postern 
gate the view of the sea and the cliffs 
was wonderful, and forward was a most 
beautiful sward, the castle yard, and broken 
parapets, and the crumbling walls of the 
castle chapel, together with other buildings 
in most picturesque confusion. We sat on 
Arthur's Seat, and looked out at his win- 
dow; we traced the ruined chapel and its 

167 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

altar stone and stone seats; we discovered the 
subterranean passage which, according to the 
traditions in the olden days, was a secret way 
to the sea. Here and there we went across 
the splendid heights of the ramparts of rocks 
overlooking the sea, and here and there the 
Laddies ran and scrambled, playing leap-frog 
where in the ancient days King Arthur and 
his knights held many a joust and tournament. 
And here, on the topmost heights of King Ar- 
thur's castle, the Lady and the Laddies, with 
the deeper bass joining in, sang an old song 
which we had often sung at home as a nursery 
rhyme : 

"King Arthur was a valiant knight. 
And a great and mighty king, 
He drove outdoors three scamps and rogues 
Because they would not sing. 

"The first he was a miller. 

The second he was a weaver. 
And the third he was a little tailor boy; 
All three rogues together. 

"The miller was drowned in his dam. 
The weaver was hung with his yarn, 
And the de'il ran away with the little tailor boy 
With his broadcloth under his arm." 

It was not a very dignified selection for such a 
somber and glorious height, but it was the 

168 




THROUGH THE POSTERN GATE, TINTAGEL. 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

only song about King Arthur that we hap- 
pened to know, and the Laddies enjoyed it. 
Fortunately we had the whole place to our- 
selves. No one was disturbed by our jollity, 
and the winds and the gulls were also singing 
so loudly that no spirits of the vasty deep or 
of the misty past were disturbed by our rol- 
licking voices on the cliff. 

From this great stronghold with its mighty 
ruins we looked across a narrow defile to an- 
other cliff with other ruins. In the ancient 
days the two portions of the cliff were con- 
nected by a drawbridge, of which we can still 
see an ancient pier and support. All these 
ruins were parts of the one castle and its vari- 
ous buildings. 

These ruins at Tintagel are very ancient. 
Some investigators contend that they can 
not be quite so ancient as King Arthur's day. 
However, they may be the ruins of a later 
stronghold which stood on the site of King 
Arthur's castle and which incorporated with 
its buildings some of the earlier castle walls 
and battlements. As we stand here it is not 
at all difficult to believe that this traditionary 
site is the veritable site of King Arthur's own 
castle. It is such a magnificent situation, so 

169 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

rugged and impressive, that we feel it surely 
ought to have been the stronghold of an early 
British King. It is perfectly fitting, absolutely 
satisfactory, as a historic site for the tradi- 
tions of King Arthur. 

It is truly "an amazing stronghold" (as some 
one has called it), with its turreted walls and 
massive ruins high on this cloven cliff of the 
sea. There is a romantic grandeur about it 
which is absolutely entrancing, and from cer- 
tain angles the sheer precipices of the cliff with 
their overhanging ruins make a wonderful sil- 
houette against the sky. 

After we had gone through the postern 
gate, — somehow we liked that postern gate, — 
we were particular to relock it, for so the cus- 
todian had given us particular direction, and 
we looked at the postern gate itself with much 
interest. We had often dreamed of it before 
coming here, for you remember that Malory 
describes it in the "Morte d'Arthur," in telling 
of that first event in the life of King Arthur 
when he was not a day old. Malory's chronicle, 
you will remember, differs somewhat from the 
mystic story of Tennyson. Malory writes: 
"Then when the lady was delivered, the King 
commanded two knights and two ladies to take 

170 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

the child, bound in a cloth of gold, and that 
ye deliver him to what poor man ye meet at 
the postern gate of the castle. So the child 
was delivered unto Merlin, and so he bare it 
forth unto Sir Hector and made an holy man 
to christen him, and named him Arthur." 

Tennyson made a first "Arthurian journey" 
in preparation for his Idylls in May and June, 
1848, when he described Tintagel: "Rainy and 
bad, went and sat in Tintagel ruins, weird- 
looking. Old castle darkening in the gloom." 
Again he visited Tintagel in August, 1860, in 
company with Francis Turner Palgrave, Hol- 
man Hunt, and two other friends. His letter- 
diary contains the entry: "August 23. Tin- 
tagel. Grand coast. Black cliffs and caves, 
storm and wind." He went a third time in 
1887. He loved this ruined castle of King 
Arthur, where Iseult sat in the last tourna- 
ment; the rushing of the sea under the great 
cave; and all the memories and visions of the 
olden days. 

The ruins seem fragmentary and scarcely 
enough to give a clear idea of what the original 
castle might have been, and yet enough to 
quicken imagination. We not only sang songs 
and shouted on the heights of King Arthur's 

171 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

castle, but the Lady read again to us some of 
Tennyson's great lines, especially concerning 
the "Coming of Arthur," when on the sloping 
shore of the cove the baby Arthur was miracu- 
lously flung by the waves to the feet of Merlin. 
These were some of Tennyson's lines: 

"And then the two 
Dropt to the cove and watched the great sea fall 
Wave after wave, each mightier than the last. 
Till last, a ninth one gathering half the deep 
And full of voices, slowly rose and plunged. 
Roaring, and all the wave was in a flamey 
And down the wave, and in the wave was borne 
A naked babe, and rode to Merlin's feet. 
Who stoopt and caught the babe and cried, 'The King! 
Here is an heir for Uther !* " 

As the Lady read, the Laddies gazed down 
the sides of the great cliff into the booming 
waters to see if once again some miracle might 
happen. But in the surf appeared only a lone 
bather, tumbling and shouting to a friend on 
the shingle. 

Still farther we read aloud upon the heights 
those words of William Howitt, written many 
years ago, but seeming still to clothe the weird 
place with a splendid life : 

"As the sound of the billows came up from below, 
and the cliffs stood around in their dark solemn 

172 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

grandeur, I gradually lost sight of the actual place 
and was gone into the very land and times of old 
romance. The Palace of Tintagel was no longer a 
ruin. It stood before me in that barbaric splendor 
I had only before supposed. There it was, in all 
its amplitude, with all its bastions and battlements, 
its towers and massy archways, dark yet glittering 
in the sun with metallic luster. The porter stood 
by its gate; the warder paced its highest turret* 
beholding with watchful glance both sea and land; 
guards walked to and fro on its great drawbridge, 
their battle-axes flashing in the morning beams as 
they turned ; pennons were streaming on every tower, 
and war-steeds were neighing in their stalls. There 
was a sound and a stir of life. Where I had seen 
before the bare green turf, I now saw knights, 
jousting for pastime in the tiltyard; where the sea 
had rolled, I beheld a fair garden. Many a young 
knight and damsel paced the pleasant garden-walks 
in high discourse or merriment, and other knights 

in alleys cool were playing at the bowls 

But the bugle blew. The great portcullis went up 
with a jar. There was a sound of horns, a clatter 
of horses' hoofs on the hard pavement, a cry of 
hounds, and forth issued from the castle court the 
most glorious pageant that the eye could look upon. 
It was no other than King Arthur, Queen Guine- 
vere, and a hundred knights and ladies equipped and 
mounted for the chase. O for some minstrel to tell 
us all their names, and place their beauty and 
bravery before us. There they were, — those famous 

173 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

warriors of the Table Round, on their strong steeds ; 
the fairest dames on earth on their ambling jennets 
of Spain, with mantles of green and purple and 
azure fluttering in the breeze and flashing in the 
sun. There they went, — the noble, stalwart, and 
magnanimous Arthur at their head, wearing his hel- 
met crown as he was wont in battle." 

How vivid it all seems when read there on 
the very soil, amid the very ruins of the castle 
called King Arthur's. Yes, from these pin- 
nacled heights where the massive fragments 
of the castle still crumble, one could scarcely 
doubt that King Arthur often walked and 
talked and gazed out upon the sea. These 
ancient ruins are dream-compelling, and espe- 
cially so on a moonlight night when there 
floats an unutterable grandeur about them in 
the soft white light and the shimmering of the 
sea. Then in truth there come also thoughts 
of that luckless couple who loved not wisely 
but too well, — the fair Queen and the valiant 
Lancelot ; then comes the tender pathos of the 
awful tragedy that brought ruin to the Table 
Round. We could almost see, as Howitt de- 
scribed, the mailed host of the great King, 
his brave cavalcade of armed knights mounted 
on their prancing charges, their lances flash- 

174 



TINTAGEL AND KING ARTHUR 

ing in the moonlight, as they go forth to the 
last great battle ; and as they wend, in a silent 
awe, a death-white mist creeps over land and 
sea, veiling even the fair face of the moon. 

The mist of Time seemed again to be 
touched by the old enchanter Merlin's wand, 
and we lived again with that brave brother- 
hood of noble knights whose creed and deed 
were in these words of Arthur: 

"I made them lay their hands in mine and swear 
To reverence the King as if he were 
Their conscience, and their conscience as their King, 
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ, 
To ride abroad, redressing human wrongs. 
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it. 
To honor his own words as if his God's, 
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity. 
To love one maiden only, cleave to her. 
And worship her by years of noble deeds. 
Until they won her; for well I knew 
Of no more subtle master under heaven 
Than is the maiden passion for a maid. 
Not only to keep down the base in man. 
But teach high thought, and amiable words 
And courtliness, and the desire of fame. 
And love of truth, and all that makes a man." 



175 



XII 

AMESBURY ABBEY AND QUEEN GUINEVERE 

WHAT took us to Amesbury was to 
find the ancient abbey wliere Queen 
Guinevere was given refuge after 
her pitiful tragedy and where finally she died. 
The place is about eight miles to the north of 
Salisbury, in that vast tract to which the gen- 
eral name is sometimes given of Salisbury 
Plain. It is a beautiful country. Lady An- 
trobus, the long-time owner and occupant of 
the Abbey, thus describes it: 

"The river Avon on its course to the sea passes 
through a beautiful valley in Wiltshire in which 
lies Amesbury, or, to follow the old spelling, Am- 
bresbury, signifying the land of Ambrosius. This 
fascinating place and the wild country surrounding 
it possess a charm and beauty all their own, and 
those born and bred there ever pine for the breezy 
downs of this Salisbury Plain as the Swiss for their 
mountains or North Country people for the moor- 
land. And no one who has walked or ridden on 
some glorious summer morning over the fine close 
grass, clothing the Wiltshire down, can ever forget 

176 



AMESBURY ABBEY 

its delicious springing quality underfoot. A tal- 
ented modem artist once happily christened Ames- 
bury, 'the golden valley.' He saw it in the spring, 
at which season of the year the whole country-side 
seems ablaze with brilliant yellow flowers." 

Our happy journey to the golden valley of 
Amesbury Avas part of a delightsome pilgrim- 
age which included Salisbury with its wonder- 
ful cathedral, Stonehenge with its vast monu- 
ment, George Herbert's church at Bemerton, 
and Wilton House with its great Van Dykes 
and its gardens. W. E. H. Lecky tells of a 
visit that he made to this region with Tenny- 
son in May, 1880, and he remarks that "Such 
a trip is an experience to abide with one for a 
lifetime. The remembrance of it rose vividly 
to my mind again as I stood by Tennyson's 
coffin in Westminster Abbey." We also re- 
membered that Carlyle and Emerson once 
made this same excursion, as the latter tells us 
in his volume on "English Traits." 

Tennyson does not often describe religious 
houses in his poems, but there are occasional 
glimpses; for instance, the tender sketch of a 
convent in "St. Agnes' Eve," 

"Deep on the convent roof the snows 
Are sparkling to the moon. 

177 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

My breath to heaven like vapor goes: 

May my soul follow soon ! 
The shadows of the convent towers 

Slant down the snowy sward, 
Still creeping with the creeping hours 

That lead me to my Lord." 

We found the abbey church dedicated to the 
memories of St. Mary and St. Melorous. It 
is a fine old parish church. It has a thir- 
teenth century chapel and a fourteenth-century 
nave. But archeologists consider that part of 
it is a much older abbey church founded by 
Queen Elfreda to expiate the murder of her 
stepson. The remains of a Saxon pillar, em- 
bedded in the masonry of the nave wall, seem 
to prove that the present building stands on 
the site of Elfreda's church. The most inter- 
esting thing that we saw inside the church was 
a window in a rather obscure corner. In it 
is a portion of very ancient stained glass, and 
on one part of it a picture very archaic, 
of a fair-haired, slender-necked woman sup- 
posed to represent Queen Guinevere. "It is 
not a very flattering portrait," the Lady re- 
marked, "I do not see how either King Ar- 
thur or Lancelot could fall in love with that 
sad face. But mayhap it was the sorrowful 
tragedy that saddened her pale face." 

178 



AMESBURY ABBEY 

It is the old chronicle of Geoffrey of Mon- 
mouth which gives Amesbury as the place of 
Queen Guinevere's penitential retirement and 
death. Malory, in the "Morte d'Arthur," 
makes mention of Amesbury in this way: 

"And thus upon a night there came a vision unto 
Sir Launcelot, and charged him in remission of all 
his sins to haste him toward Almesbury, and by 
that time thou come there thou shalt find Queen 
Guenever dead. And therefore take thy fellows 
with thee, and also purvey thee a horse bier, and 
bring you the corpse of her and bury it by her 
lord and husband. Then Sir Launcelot took his 
seven fellows with him, and on foot they went from 
Glastonbury which is little more than thirty miles. 
And when Sir Launcelot was come to Almesbury 
within the nunnery Queen Guenever died but half 
an hour before." 

Tennyson follows the ancient legends but 
makes his own variations. 

It is an interesting tradition mentioned by 
Geoffrey of Monmouth that there was here an 
ancient British monastery for three hundred 
monks, founded some say by the famous 
Prince Ambrosius, who lived at the time of 
the Saxon invasion, and who was buried there- 
in. This monastery was prior to Queen El- 
freda's nunnery. 

179 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

We were sorry to find that the ancient abbey 
itself had been rebuilt or overbuilt into a mod- 
ern residence, with the old name Amesbury 
Abbey retained, but with little of the ancient 
ecclesiastical tradition or simplicity. It is now 
a stately mansion. Hardly a single stone of 
the old abbey remains above ground, but many 
traces of cells were discovered underground 
when foundations were being dug for the pres- 
ent building. The old Abbey grounds once 
covered a space of thirteen acres. Not far 
from the Abbey we saw an ancient farmhouse 
of dark gray stone. It consisted of a group 
of buildings with thatched roofs, — stables, 
barns and outhouses, — and all so venerable and 
picturesque amid its hedges and noble trees, 
that it looked much more like one's ideal of 
the abbey than the modern manor house. 

Tradition tells us that Queen Guinevere 
spent the night at Romsey Abbey, another 
great nunnery, on the way to Almesbury. We 
had just visited Romsey, which is admirably 
preserved, — a wonderfully perfect specimen 
of Norman work, — and we wondered v/hether 
Amesbury Abbey had been in its day some- 
thing like this wonderful creation. Romsey 
Abbey was spared by the iconoclast and has 

180 



AMESBURY ABBEY 

been erected into the parish church. It is 
singularly chaste and beautiful. Its Norman 
columns, arches, and ornamentations are per- 
haps as fine as anything in the kingdom. The 
famous Romsey crucifix, a very archaic carv- 
ing, still remains on the outside wall, and there 
is some quaint humor in the gargoyles, per- 
haps a sly fling at the nuns themselves, for the 
faces on the gargoyles are entirely the faces 
of cats in varying styles of grimace and 
grotesqueness. 

If Queen Guinevere spent the night at 
Romsey Abbey on her way to Amesbury, she 
also doubtless passed on Salisbury Plain 
that most ancient monumental glory of Eng- 
land, the wonderful sun-temple at Stonehenge. 
Certainly Queen Guinevere looked upward at 
these weird masses of rock as she came to 
Amesbury Abbey, for she could not escape 
them. Doubtless the eyes of King Arthur also 
gazed upon them and mused in wonder. The 
little lad who drove us in his pony cart to 
Amesbury Abbey and Stonehenge talked as 
incessantly as the little maid who chattered to 
Queen Guinevere in her sad days in the Ab- 
bey. As we rode along our pilgrim path to 
Stonehege, the skylarks were singing, and one 

181 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

could see the shepherd and the sheep here and 
there upon the horizon, reminding us of the 
Roman Campagna. Far off, we saw the dim, 
mysterious forms of the mighty monoliths ap- 
pearing, and then as we draw nearer on the un- 
dulating road they disappeared again, shut off 
by an intervening hill. We did not see them 
again until we got quite near. Then their 
majesty and grandeur burst upon us suddenly. 
They are colossal. 

Some say they were a great temple for the 
Druids ; others contend that they were a Phoe- 
nician sun-temple erected before the time of 
Christ. The archeologist, Dr. Flinders-Petrie, 
gives his opinion that this temple at Stone- 
henge was erected between a.d. 500 and 900. 
But another archeologist, Mr. Edmund Story 
Maskelyne, puts the date at 900 to 1000 B.C. 
The outer circle measures 308 feet in circum- 
ference. Originally there were thirty upright 
stones, seventeen of which are still standing. 
There is an inner circle and also a great ellipse. 

The most interesting feature of Stonehenge 
is that on the 21st of June, the day of the solar 
half-year, the sun as it creeps over the horizon 
sheds its beams exactly on the great altar stone, 
and then and there the human victim was slain. 

182 



AMESBURY ABBEY 

Such mighty stones are nowhere else to be 
found in this neighborhood. They are what 
are known as bhie stones, and are native only 
to Brittany or Normandy. They were prob- 
ably brought in Greek or Phcenician ships, 
landed at Pool or Christchurch on the coast, 
and then transported by rafts or overland to 
Amesbury. However they were brought or 
for what religious purpose, there they stand, 
the most ancient monument of Britain, full of 
fascinating mystery and unutterable grandeur, 
looking down on Amesbury Abbey and on the 
whole history of Britain as the Sphinx and the 
Pyramids look down on Egypt. 

Let me quote again from Lady Aritrobus, 
who loves them: 

"To my mind the magic of Stonehenge is never 
more powerfully felt than during the wild, tempestu- 
ous autumnal gales that usually sweep across Salis- 
bury Plain in October, — great clouds roll above, 
enfolding the circle in a shadowy purple mantle, 
sometimes tipped with gold. Thoughts rise up sud- 
denly of the many tragedies, feasts, sacrifices, mys 
terious rites that must have been enacted here in 
far-off bygone days. One wonders if beautiful 
golden-haired Guinevere passed this way on her 
flight to safety at the convent at Almesbury, the 
land of Ambrosius, or if sad King Arthur tarried 

183 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

there on his lonely homeward journey. I prefer to 
picture to myself Stonehenge in happy, thoughtless 
pagan days, Druid priests and priestesses forming 
grand processions, crossing the rushing Avon, and 
winding up from the valley to Stonehenge, clothed 
in pure white, and holding gleaming sickles in their 
hands, chanting hymns on their way to perform the 
sacred rite of cutting the mistletoe. Perhaps they 
sang and chanted through the short summer night, 
waiting for the sun to rise over the pointed out- 
lying stone on the day which marks the solar half- 
year, June 21 and which bathes the altar stone in 
golden light. Probably this was the signal for 
sacrifice, the death of the victim and the appeasing 
of the wrathful gods." 

Stonehenge meant much to our Tennysonian 
pilgrimage, not merely because King Arthur 
and Queen Guinevere had looked upon it on 
their Amesbury journey, but also because it 
furnished many stories for the Laddies. Some 
of them were concerning the ancient traditions 
that this mighty monument was built by the 
great magician Merlin. The old British King 
Constantine had two sons, Pendragon and 
Uther. A great battle was fought on Salis- 
bury Plain against the Saxons. Pendragon 
was killed. Uther took his name, and was 
henceforth called Uther Pendragon. To com- 

184 



AMESBURY ABBEY 

memorate the honored Uther, the magician 
Merhn built this colossal monument on the site 
of the battle — a monument greater than man 
had known and destined to last forever. Here 
also King Uther Pendragon was buried. Now, 
this Uther Pendragon was the father of King 
Arthur. 

But to come back to Tennyson, and the 
"Idylls." The scene where King Arthur found 
Queen Guinevere at Amesbury Abbey is full 
of pathos and power. The Lady read it aloud 
to us here in charming old Amesbury. A part 
of it we may venture to recall : 

"Queen Guinevere had fled the court and sat 
There in the holy house at Almesbury 
Weeping, none with her save a little maid, 
A novice. One low^ light betwixt them burn'd, 
Blurr'd by the creeping mist, for all abroad. 
Beneath a white moon unseen albeit at full. 
The white mist, like a face-cloth to the face. 
Clung to the dead earth, and the land was still. 

Then on a sudden cry, 'The King!' She sat 
Stiff-stricken, listening; but when armed feet 
Thro' the long gallery from the outer doors. 
Rang coming, prone from off her seat she fell. 
And grovell'd with her face against the floor: 
There with her milk-white arms and shadowy hair 
She made her face a darkness from the King; 

185 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

And in the darkness heard his armed feet 
Pause by her; then came silence, then a voice. 
Monotonous and hollow like a ghost's. 
Denouncing judgment, but tho' changed, the King's. 

'Yet think not that I come to urge thy crimes, 

I did not come to curse thee, Guinevere, 

I, whose vast pity almost makes me die 

To see thee, laying there thy golden head. 

My pride in happier summers, at my feet. 

The wrath which forced my thoughts on that fierce law, 

The doom of treason and the flaming death 

(When first I learnt thee hidden here) is past. 

The pang — which while I weighed thy heart with one 

Too wholly true to dream untruth in thee, 

Made my tears burn — is also past — ^in part. 

And all is past, the sin is sinn'd and I 

Lo ! I forgive thee, as Eternal God 

Forgives; do for thine own soul the rest. 

But how to take leave of all I loved.'' 

golden hair, with which I used to play 
Not knowing! O imperial molded form. 
And beauty such as never woman wore. 

So far, that my doom is, I love thee still. 
Let no man dream but that I love thee still. 
Perchance, and so thou purify thy soul, 
And so thou lean on our fair Father Christ, 
Hereafter in that world where all are pure 
We two may meet before high God, and thou 
Wilt spring to me, and claim me thine, and know 

1 am thine husband. . . ." 



186 



XIII 

CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

ONE day we were standing at Land's 
End, — that extreme point of south- 
western England, looking over the sea, 
toward the Scilly Isles, — and meditating on 
the Arthurian legends. Beneath the ocean at 
this point, all the way from Land's End to the 
islands, lies, according to the legends and tra- 
ditions, the mystic lost land of Lyonesse. 
Tennyson once wrote of it in prose: 

"On the latest limit of the West, in the land of 
Lyonesse, where save the rocky isles of Scilly, all 
is now wild sea, rose the sacred mount of Camelot. 
At the top was King Arthur's hall, and the holy 
minster. The mount was the most beautiful in the 
world, underneath was hollow; the seas rushed bel- 
lowing through the porphyry caves." 

This he had written as a note long before he 
had essayed the serious task of composing his 
gi-eat "Idylls." 

Camelot and the land of Lyonesse seem a 
dim and shadowy region. But we found some- 

187 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

thing in that Cornish coast still existing to re- 
mind us, especially in the moonlight, of what 
Camelot might have been. We discovered the 
beautiful island and picturesque castle of St. 
Michael's Mount at Marazion a few miles from 
Penzance in this weird country. The island 
juts up high from the sea, a perfect mount, and 
on its summit is perched the picturesque 
stronghold and church which has had most in- 
teresting history from the Middle Ages. It 
is smaller but hardly less picturesque than its 
more famous counterpart, Mont St. Michel 
in Brittany on the opposite coast. 

Do you remember Tennyson's lines in the 
Morte d' Arthur? 

"So all day long the noise of battle roU'd 
Among the mountains by the winter sea; 
Until King Arthur's table, man by man, 
Had fallen in Lyonesse about their Lord, 
King Arthur; then, because his wound was deep. 
The bold Sir Bedivere uplifted him. 
Sir Bedivere, the last of all his knights. 
And bore him to a chapel nigh the field, 
A broken channel with a broken cross. 
That stood on a dark strait of barren land. 
On one side lay the Ocean, and on one 
Lay a great water, and the moon was full." 

We were reading these lines as we came near 

188 



CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

to that ancient chapel and castle of St. Mi- 
chael's Mount, and so beautiful it all was that 
we fell to wondering about those mystic days 
in ancient Lyonesse. St. Michael's Mount is 
the "Ictis" of the ancients, as our infallible 
Baedeker assures us, and its earliest historical 
occupant, if legend be fact, was the Giant Cor- 
moran, who was slain by Jack the Giant-killer. 
The castle in modern times has long belonged 
to Lord St. Levan, of the St. Aubin family. 

The lost land of Lyonesse, according to an- 
cient legend, used to jut far out into the sea 
for forty miles or more, but it was submerged 
by some strange catastrophe, an earthquake 
or some fiery storm and subsidence of the re- 
gion below the sea, and, according to the old 
chronicles, about 140 parishes were thus en- 
gulfed. So it is called 

"A land of old upheaven from the abyss 
By fire, to sink into the abyss again." 

The only remaining portions of the old lost 
land of Lyonesse, Sir Tristran's country, are 
in the fifty or more little spots of land appear- 
ing above the waves about forty miles from 
the mainland, the Cassiterides of the ancients, 
but now called the Scilly Isles. Only five are 

189 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

inhabited. The largest is St. Mary's with a 
castle; Tresco with an old ruined abbey, and 
a rocky height, and caves, and wonderful sub- 
tropical gardens where hundreds of thousands 
of narcissus are growing. These islands I have 
seen in the early morning, as they lifted from 
the sea wrapped in a pale mist. But most 
beautiful, I think, are they at sunset time, as 
I once saw them, looking like isles of dream in 
their tintings of rose and violet, and the sur- 
rounding waters a mass of "tossing and tum- 
bling gold." 

And here on the coast of the mystic land 
of Lyonesse, we also meditated on these dim 
and shadowy legends of King Ai'thur and his 
Round Table of valiant knights. How much 
is myth, how much is history? Who can tell? 

The legends of King Arthur began among 
the Welsh bards of the seventh century. These 
legends were collected by Geoffrej^ of Mon- 
mouth in the twelfth century. They were first 
printed by Caxton in 1485, in the chronicles 
of Sir Thomas Malory, called the "Morte 
d' Arthur." Modern scholars differ as to the 
authenticity of the main facts of these legends. 
There are some historical writers who ac- 
knowledge Arthur as a Romanized Briton of 

190 



CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

the fifth century, who fought to maintain 
Christianity against the hordes of Picts and 
other barbarians of the North. He was prob- 
ably born at Tintagel and held his court there 
and at Camelot, and at Caerleon-on-Usk. He 
fought twelve great battles and was victorious, 
but in the thirteenth he was defeated and 
wounded unto death, and was, according to 
tradition, buried at Glastonbury. This was in 
542 A.D. 

Some on the other hand contend that many 
of these legends are altogether due to the 
imagination of Welsh bards, and there is only 
the slightest of historical foundations for these 
splendid stories. They contend that Arthur 
was not known to the Gaels, but only to the 
Welsh, the British, the Picts, and the Scots; 
that the Round Table is a still later addition, 
by bards and chroniclers possibly of the thir- 
teenth century, and that the burial and shrine 
at Glastonbury are the pious inventions of the 
monks. 

It is a most difficult question to unravel and 
settle; a whole library of literature is the re- 
sult of the controversy, and the clear light has 
not yet come. Tintagel seems a true and in- 
disputable spot. The persistent legends of 

191 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

the centuries pointing to this place must have 
some truth in them. That noble cliff with its 
ruins is so nakedly primitive and so grandly 
gloomy. "Half in sea and high on land, a 
crown of towers by these crags of Cornwall, 
water lapped." Whether Tennyson in his later 
years really believed in the reputed history 
of King Arthur remains uncertain; but cer- 
tain it is that he fully accepted the legends as 
a beautiful and heroic story that could teach 
lessons for all time. 

He was engaged on the "Idylls of the King" 
for thirty years of his life. He began with 
some single poems such as "The Lady of 
Shalott," "Sir Galahad," "Sir Launcelot and 
Queen Guinevere," and the "Morte d' Arthur." 
But these were only preliminary sketches, as 
the great themes began to take hold of him. 
The first real "Idylls" were published in 1859, 
and consisted of four, "Enid," "Vivien," 
"Elaine," and "Guinevere." In 1862, he wrote 
the dedication to the Prince Consort. In 1869, 
he published "The Coming of Arthur," "The 
Holy Grail," "Pelleas and Etarre," and "The 
Passing of Arthur." In 1871, he added "The 
Last Tournament," and in 1885, he completed 
the "Idylls" by publishing "Balin and Balan," 

192 



^^ 




CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

"Geraint and Enid," and "The Marriage of 
Geraint," which was really the first idyll of 
"Enid" divided in two and completed. 

All through the great story of the "Idylls" 
Camelot stands out in great prominence as the 
center of the splendid scenes, yet its identifica- 
tion is still disputed. One claimant is Queen 
Camel in Somerset, now a little village one mile 
south of Yeoville Junction, halfway between 
Salisbury and Exeter. Professor William J. 
Rolfe, in his edition of the "Idylls of the 
King," says of Camelot, the capital of King 
Arthur: "Its situation, like that of many lo- 
calities in the Arthurian stories, is vaguely in- 
.dicated. But it was probably at or near the 
place now called Queen Camel in Somerset- 
shire." As far as we could learn, however, this 
place, even in its topography, does not at all 
fulfill the descriptions. 

Another claimant is Camelot, near Falkirk, 
Scotland, and some hold that the last great 
battle against the Picts was fought here at the 
Scottish border. Still another claimant is 
Winchester, the ancient capital of Britain, 
which is mentioned by some of the first chroni- 
clers as having in earlier days been the Came- 
lot of Arthur. It still possesses one serious 

193 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

piece of evidence, King Arthur's Round Table, 
a relic whose authentic history certainly goes 
back many centuries. 

The bulk of the traditions seemed to point 
to Camelford in Cornwall, and thither our pil- 
grimage wended its way. Camelford is a small 
and not very interesting little village on the 
winding river Allen. It has only one good 
inn; a town hall with a camel for its weather- 
vane; one long street with shambling houses; 
and a picturesque stone bridge over the little 
river. The place looks as if it were rarely 
visited by travelers, and there is very little to 
detain them. At once the present contour of 
the land and the narrowness of the little river, 
scarcely more than eighteen or twenty feet 
broad, seemed to dispel from our minds any 
lingering illusions about this region having 
been the original Camelot. This sleepy little 
town of Camelford could never have been the 
wonderful Camelot, "city of shadowy palaces 
and stately." It would require astounding 
imagination to make Camelot this insignifi- 
cant into Camelot the magnificent. 

Camelot, to our thought, is a splendid 
dream city, even finer than what we see to-day 
in the medieval city of Rothenberg-on-Tauber, 

194 



CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

or the picturesque town of Carcassone in 
southern France. The French artist, Gustave 
Dore, has wonderfully portrayed Camelot in 
his great illustration to the "Idylls." Perhaps 
after all the nearest that we have in England 
to-day approaching our ideals of Camelot is 
Windsor Castle and its nestling town under 
the glow and glory of the sunset hour. 

Nevertheless, persistent Arthurian tradition 
has lingered here at Camelford. We drove 
out from the town to Slaughter Bridge. The 
bridge itself gives evidences of being of very 
ancient construction. It is granite and was 
apparently once a simple clapper bridge of 
single stones, like the famous Post Bridge in 
Dartmoor. The parapets of the bridge have 
seemingly been a later addition. Around this 
bridge in the meadow, and upon the hills and 
along the banks of the river, according to tradi- 
tion, the great last battle of King Arthur was 
fought, in which Modred was slain and King 
Arthur himself was mortally wounded. It was 
fought in one of those thick sea-fogs which to 
this day often sweep over this region. As 
Tennyson says of that battle, 

"A death-white mist swept over sand and sea, 
. . . And e'en on Arthur fell 
Confusion, since he saw not whom he fought." 

195 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Not far from the bridge is a place called 
Arthur's Grave, where close to the river under 
a little cliff, down which we climbed, lies a 
great stone sepulcher under some trees, and 
on it is a Roman inscription. We had called 
at the neighboring cottage for a guide to lead 
us to the hidden place of sepulcher, and a little, 
barefooted girl of twelve years led us to the 
place. We asked her if she knew the inscrip- 
tion on the stone, and she recited glibly: 
"Latinus hie jacet filius Megari." 
We looked at the stone a little more closely, 
and although the inscription was somewhat 
worn and in some places covered by the moss, 
we could see that she was correct. This was 
the inscription, and being translated it read: 
"Hear lieth Latinus, son of Magarus." Now 
Latinus was a famous British chief, and how 
it has ever come that his sepulcher stone should 
be here Qver the reputed grave of King Arthur, 
is unexplained. It is said, however, and be- 
lieved by many in Cornwall, that King Ar- 
thur actually died and was buried here near 
the place of the last great battle, and that this 
Roman stone was temporarily placed over his 
grave. That afterward his body was removed, 
the stone still remaining to mark the first place 

196 



CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

of his burial, and that he was finally trans- 
lated to the Abbey tomb of Glastonbury, 
where he was interred with great pomp under 
the high altar. 

The mystic lake of the Tennyson "Idylls," 
where the sword Excalibur was found and to 
which it was finally committed, is reputed to 
be Dozemary Pool, about nine miles from 
Camelford. We were not able to reach it, but 
I have the account of one or two travelers who 
were successful in finding it. One says that a 
more out-of-the-way spot than Dozemary Pool 
could hardly be found. In situation and ap- 
pearance no place could be more appropriate ; 
the cross-country journey from Camelford 
over the moors is almost impossible, for there 
are few paths and the bogs are many. The 
Cornish people have a dread of the place, and 
there are some who would not go near it for all 
the world. Many believe that it is haunted, 
and they hear the noise of Hellhounds in the 
night; but some say these are only the noises 
caused by the flights of wild geese, over the 
moor and around the pool. 

Crossing the road, near the center of the 
moor, a thousand feet above the sea, we follow 
a lane or rather moorland track, and after pass- 

197 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

ing a couple of small homesteads and climbing 
a low hill, whose surface is much broken by 
peat borings, we see in front of us the far- 
famed mere. There is a one-storied home- 
stead, like an Irish cabin, on its western shore, 
where a boat is kept. The first sight is rather 
disappointing. Its circular shores are flat, and 
in one place a field comes down to the margin 
of the lake. No rugged hills rise precipitously 
above it, neither do boulders strew its shore. 
Nevertheless, it grows upon one; its situation 
is remarkable, one thousand feet above the sea 
and a deep valley on each side of it ; no streams 
run into it, and all around is the wide, silent 
moor, whose skyline is broken here and there 
with great bosses of granite or the monoliths 
and stone circles of the Druids. 

It is an impressive scene under any circum- 
stances, but as the gloaming steals over the 
broad shoulders of the hills, giving to their 
heathy sides a softness as of velvet, and as the 
last warm blush in the western sky is reflected 
in the still bosom of the lake, we realize the 
glamor of our surroundings, and the arm 
clothed in white samite, that rose and clutched 
Excalibur, seems almost possible. As the 
night wrapped her dark mantle around the 

198 



CAMELOT AND LYONESSE 

wilds, and the sweet stars glittered overhead, 
we fancied we could almost see the dusky- 
barge steal silently across the lake to bear the 
dying king to the island valley of Avalon. 
Recall Tennyson's haunting lines (from The 
Passing of Arthur) : 

"The great brand 
Made lightnings in the splendor of the moon . . . 
So flashed and fell the brand Excalibur 
But ere he dipt the surface, rose an arm 
Clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful, 
And caught him by the hilt and brandish'd him 
Three times and drew him under in the mere . . . 
Then saw they how there hove a dusky barge 
Dark as a funeral scarf from stem to stern. 
Beneath them; and descending they were ware 
That all the decks were dense with stately forms, 
Black-stoled, black-hooded, like a dream — by these 
Three queens with crowns of gold — and from them rose 
A cry that shiver 'd to the tingling stars. 
And, as it were one voice, an agony 
Of lamentation, like a wind that shrills 
All night in a waste land, where no one comes. 
Or hath come, since the making of the world." 



199 



XIV 

WINCHESTER AND KING ARTHUR'S 
ROUND TABLE 

IN Winchester our special interest was first 
of all the very ancient Round Table, 
claimed for King Arthur, and still exist- 
ing in the great Hall of the Castle of Win- 
chester, and also to study well the evidences 
for Winchester as the mythical Camelot of the 
legend. 

It was on St. Swithin's Day, the day of its 
patron saint, that we came into Winchester, 
along with King George and Queen Mary. 
To be sure they were not a part of our pil- 
grimage, but they were they to grace the his- 
toric occasion. It was the time of a royal 
visit — the first for many years, although kings 
and queens had been frequent visitors to old 
Winchester in the days when it was the royal 
capital of Britain. They had come on this oc- 
casion to commemorate the restoration of the 
cathedral, and to hold a special royal thanks- 
giving service for the saving of the fabric from 
decay and destruction. 

200 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

It seems that the ancient builders of these 
cathedrals were not always wise in their day 
and generation, although, forsooth, they build- 
ed as wisely as they knew. But they did not 
always get a good foundation, — they had not 
secured such for Winchester, and the building 
began to settle in the course of the centuries 
until it was in great danger. The work of in- 
serting new foundations under it has been 
going on for the last six years and has cost 
about one hundred thousand pounds. It was 
necessary to dig down through peat and sand 
below the water-level to the hard clay. The 
work was done in the dark depths, often under 
water, by a workman in a diver's suit, and he 
carefully filled in thousands of tons of cement 
and concrete, making new foundations which 
ought to last for thousands of years to come. 

It is a cathedral well worth saving. For it 
is surely one of the most historic and glorious 
monuments in England. The city itself was 
successively the British, Celtic, Roman, Saxon, 
Danish, and Norman capital of Britain. We 
agree with Dean Kitchin, that it is 

*'a very moving thing to be able to look back 
eight hundred years and think of those who have 
trodden these selfsame floors. This church of Win- 

201 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Chester has been visited by ahnost every prince and 
noted man in English history. It was built to be to 
Nonnan England what the temple had been to the 
Jews, — the central expression of a nation's faith, 
the place dedicated to the concentrated work of a 
conquering race. It was the seat of great bishops 
who advanced their country's welfare in matters of 
art and learning and religion." 

The whole early history of England and much 
of its later history seems bound up with this 
cathedral. 

Winchester was in gala attire. The houses 
were all bravely decorated, festoons of flowers 
were hanging from side to side along the 
streets, banners and coats of arms and the 
royal crown were displayed at various points 
of vantage, the ancient market cross and the 
many old-fashioned timbered houses, such as 
the famous "God-begot House," with the 
upper gables projecting over the narrow 
streets, made it seem a veritable bit of Shake- 
speare's England, — truly so if the good-na- 
tured crowds had only been attired in costumes 
a little less modern and a little more pic- 
turesque. 

We mingled with the multitude on the 
streets and waited for the procession. Finally, 

202 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

the cannons boomed from the hills, and the 
bells of all the churches began to ring as the 
royal procession came into the town. The 
sounding of the trumpets grew louder. We 
stood on tiptoe; then one of the Laddies 
climbed up and perched on my shoulders, and 
another got up on to the window casement of 
the Town Hall. First came the carriages with 
the earls and dukes who were the honorary 
hosts of the occasion; then the brilliant out- 
riders of the King; and then the family of 
royalty itself in a handsome open barouche. 
King George wore a light beaver high hat, and 
Queen Mary, beautifully gowned, as my Lady 
assured me, looked every inch a queen. We 
formed a bowing acquaintance with them at 
once, and the Laddies stoutly affirmed that the 
Queen looked straight at them and smiled. 
Here was part of the order of procedure,— 
all printed out in black and white: 

"The Mayor will tender the city mace to His 
Majesty. 

His Majesty will touch the mace. 

The Lord Lieutenant will then present the 
Mayoress to His Majesty and to Her Maj- 
esty. 

203 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

The Mayoress will ask Her Majesty's gracious 
acceptance of a bouquet. 

The Mayor will come forward from the right 
of the dais, accompanied by the recorder and 
the Town Clerk. 

Recorder reads address. The Mayor receiv- 
ing address from Recorder, hands same to 
His Majesty. 

His Majesty reads his reply and hands it to 
the Mayor. 

Their Majesties then sign the Mayor's book. 

Their Majesties on leaving the dais will be 
escorted to their carriage, which then pro- 
ceeds round the King Alfred statue. Car- 
riage will halt here while children sing the 
National Anthem. 

The exact order of the cathedral service was 
also duly printed, and among the items was the 
following: "During the singing of the hymn 
the offertory will be taken and the alms-bag 
will be offered Their Majesties by the Senior 
Verger, W. Bond, who has held this office 
forty years." So not even Majesty escapes the 
alms-bag. 

That great statue of King Alfred, referred 
204 




WINCHESTER CATHEDRAL. 




WESTGATE, WINCHESTER. 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

to in the royal program, is the most imposing 
feature of the streets of Winchester. It stands 
near the Guild Hall, colossal in size. King 
Alfred is the actual thing in Winchester, with 
the veritable history all about him, and noth- 
ing shadowy and mythical like that which gath- 
ers at times about King Arthur. King Alfred 
lived and walked these very streets of Win- 
chester, and here he wrought many of his noble 
deeds. 

Of course the Laddies had to listen to the 
story of King Alfred who once hid from his 
enemies in the house of a cowherd. The cow- 
herd's wife was baking some cakes, and King 
Alfred was sitting by the fire. She asked him 
to look after them for a moment while she 
stepped out. The cakes burned, and he was 
so busy mending his bows and arrows that he 
didn't know it. The cowherd's wife was very 
angry and scolded him: "Can't you look at the 
cakes and not let them burn? You'll be ready 
to eat them fast enough when the time comes." 
For she did not know it was the king. 

And since King Canute had also lived here 
in Winchester, the Lady reminded them again 
of the story of him at Southampton water 
near by, from which we had just come. His 

205 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

courtiers had told him that he was the greatest 
king in the world and that even the sea would 
obey him. So he had his chair put on the sand 
at low tide, and he commanded the waves to 
keep back, but they came up and gave him a 
good wetting. So he told his courtiers not to 
flatter him any more. And he came back to 
Winchester, and brought his crown and hung 
it upon the cross. 

Winchester and London were the only 
places shown on the ancient Anglo-Saxon map 
of the world. Winchester continued as the 
capital for many centuries, until the greater 
commercial importance and increasing popula- 
tion of London made that city the political 
capital of the realm and the seat of government 
was removed to Westminster Palace. King 
Canute made Winchester his royal seat and 
lived here many years with Emma, his queen. 
He and his queen were buried in the cathedral. 
Here most of the English kings from Egbert 
to Edward the Confessor were crowned, and 
although after this date the sovereigns were 
crowned in Westminster Abbey, it continued 
to be a custom down to the reign of Edward 
I for the king to visit Winchester at Eastertide 
and wear his crown there in solemn state. In 

203 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

this cathedral took place the marriage of 
Queen Mary with King Philip of Spain. 

The city was long a favorite abode of royal- 
ty. Parliaments were frequently held here, 
even down to the latter part of the thirteenth 
century. Henry VIII entertained the Em- 
peror Charles V with great pomp at the castle 
of Winchester in 1522. King Alfred in the 
earlier times here held his court and wrote the 
Saxon Chronicles. Bishop Thorold writes of it 
as a city of memories, saying: 

"The hills yet stand round our Jerusalem, the 
hills that have seen so much and said nothing. The 
hills over which William of Wjkeham students still 
gaily roam, and up which Waltheof went to die; the 
hills which have looked down on sieges and con- 
flagrations, and on the Black Death; on stately 
buildings slowly rising, and on tragic mockeries of 
justice; the hills which we may still look on as the 
psalmist of old looked up at his hills in Judea, as 
a sort of inspired testimony of the righteous gov- 
ernment of God and of the indestructibleness of his 
church." 

For truly this cathedral of Winchester at 
which we to-day were assembled for the royal 
thanksgiving service had already stood "twice 
as long as the great Jewish temple of old." 

207 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

We attended service in the glorious old 
cathedral in the morning at ten, and heard the 
special thanksgiving anthem which was also 
to be given at the royal service in the after- 
noon for which a seat might be had by a con- 
tribution of five guineas or more toward the 
restoration fund. Among the tablets in the 
cathedral, that which interested most the man 
of our party was one little side chapel contain- 
ing a memorial of Izaak Walton, — that gentle 
and philosophic soul who wrote "The Compleat 
Angler" and the "Lives of the Poets." But 
the Lady of our pilgrimage, for her part, was 
especially interested in a tablet to the novelist, 
Jane Austen, for this distinguished writer 
lived some years here at Winchester and 
died here. The Lady also made a little pil- 
grimage of her own to seek out Jane Austen's 
house. 

But by far the most fascinating and im- 
pressive thing in the cathedral for us all were 
the small mortuary chests that were placed 
high on the canopy round the choir, contain- 
ing the bones of nearly all those old Saxon 
kings that we have read about in English his- 
tory. There are six of these leaden chests, 
with inscriptions on them. One tells of the 

208 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

bones of King Edred; another speaks of King 
Edmund; in this casket lies the dust of King 
Canute and Rufus and Queen Emma; in still 
another repose King Egbert and King Ke- 
nulf ; in another the remains of King Kinegil 
and Ethel wulf, the father of King Alfred the 
Great. King Alfred himself is buried before 
the high altar, and not far off is Hardicanute, 
the last Danish monarch, and William Rufus, 
the son of William the Conqueror, killed in the 
New Forest. 

We were also interested in another feature 
of this most ancient capital of Britain, — Win- 
chester College, founded in 1393 under the 
care of the monks of St. Swithin's Priory. It 
is one of the finest schools in the kingdom. 
King Ethelwulf and King Alfred were edu- 
cated in this school even before it became a 
college. Its motto is, "Manners makyth 
man." 

St. Cross Hospital is another of the medi- 
eval buildings which are most attractive, both 
in their architecture and in their old-time cus- 
toms. Here thirteen poor old men are con- 
stantly boarded free, and a hundred other poor 
men are supplied with free dinners daily; and 
to every comer who asks for it, is still given 

209 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

a "wayfarer's dole," consisting of a horn of 
ale and a slice of white bread. 

All these things interested us greatly, and 
yet our special object of pilgrimage was King 
Arthur's Round Table in the Great Hall of 
Winchester Castle. The Great Hall is all that 
is now left of the splendid ancient castle that 
stood here, even until Henry VIII's time, but 
was destroyed in the wars of the Puritan Com- 
monthwealth. It is a magnificent room, once 
used for parliaments and great assemblies and 
splendid state banquets. We found, to the 
Laddies' amusement, one very curious thing 
here, — a narrow passage through the wall, 
called the King's "Lug." It is on the west 
side of this Great Hall, leading to a secret 
chamber. Tradition says that when Parlia- 
ments were held here, as they were more or less 
for four hundred years, — this little passage 
through the wall was the King's Ear, or Lug, 
which enabled him to hear what was going on 
in Parliament without being seen. It was in 
this hall, we may remember, that Richard 
Coeur de Lion was received by all his nobles 
when he returned from captivity, and in this 
hall also Sir Walter Raleigh was tried and sent 
to the Tower of London. 

210 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

Court is still held in this castle as in the an- 
cient days, but it is no longer the court of 
King Arthur, but the courts of justice for the 
County of Hants. The hall is still grand and 
impressive, with fine arches, clustered columns, 
and stained-glass windows. Three windows 
picture three kings, Arthur, Alfred, and Ca- 
nute, — a Briton, a Saxon, and a Dane, but all 
kings of glorious memory. 

Was Winchester the ancient Camelot ? Who 
can determine? We can well believe it, if 
we pin our faith to good old Thomas Malory, 
who says most surely and distinctly, — "Came- 
lot, that is in English, Winchester." The gen- 
eral contour of the land satisfies us better than 
Camelford in Cornwall, or Queen Camel in 
Somerset. This castle on the heights, this 
winding river Itchen leading to the sea, are 
suggestive. We know that King Alfred lived 
here, and King Canute, and King William the 
Conqueror. Why not go back still farther to 
King Arthur? Yea, on this gala day with a 
real king and queen here in this Camelot which 
is in English Winchester, we thought it a good 
time to recall that exquisite story for the Lad- 
dies of one of King Arthur's gala days, a tour- 
nament at Camelot where Lancelot came after 

211 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

his singular adventure with Elaine, the lily 
maid of Astolat. Our Lady of the pilgrimage 
told it most charmingly. But you know the 
story well — one of the fairest among Tenny- 
son's "Idylls." Here is Camelot, but where is 
Astolat we have not yet quite determined. 

But now, what of this King Arthur's Round 
Table, which we had especially come to see? 
We found it was no longer used as a banquet- 
ing table, but had been lifted and hung up on 
the venerable walls, and hanging there it 
looked something like the face of an ancient 
clock, or an astronomical chart with the signs 
of the Zodiac. Nevertheless, it is a great 
table-top, seventeen feet in diameter. It is 
constructed of large panels of wood, the alter- 
nate panels being painted white and green, and 
radiating from the center like the spokes of a 
wheel. The wood is good old English oak, 
which lasts forever. At the center is carved 
and painted a double rose. In the middle of 
the upper half is a patterned canopy, with 
King Arthur sitting beneath it crowned and 
holding an orb and a sword. The painting is 
somewhat faded and blackened by the years. 
In an inner circle around the rose is an inscrip- 
tion in old lettering and spelling, "This is the 

212 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

Round Table of King Arthur and his twenty- 
four Knights." And on the outer edge are the 
names of these Iviiights, one for each seat. 

The custodian of the castle told me that he 
had seen the other side of the table, and had 
noted its construction. It has distinct places 
for the table legs. Indeed, he had a photo- 
graph of the other side, which showed it as a 
real table and not as a wall ornament. He 
mentioned that it had been actually used often- 
times at great banquets in that very hall. 

Of course there are doubters and scoffers 
and iconoclasts when it comes to this Round 
Table of King Arthur. Some say that King 
Arthur's Table had place for one hundred and 
fifty knights. This has seats for only twenty- 
four. Some say that it is merely a wheel of 
fortune and they refer to an order by the 
builders of the palace of King Henry III, 
1253, for the constructing of a wheel of for- 
tune ; but no one can prove that the two things 
are identical. Some think that it was a seat 
of Justice in the ancient times, at which the 
King and his knights used to sit when making 
judicial decisions. Still others contend that it 
was a round table constructed after the tradi- 
tions of King Arthur but used merely for the 

213 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

banqueting of the Knights and for encourage- 
ment of tournaments and military pastimes, 
and that it was the precursor of the Order of 
the Garter. Michael Drayton in his ancient 
rhymed history of the sixteenth century men- 
tions it thus, 

"And so great Arthur's seat oulde Winchester prefers 
Whose oulde Round Table yet, she vaunteth to be 
hers." 

Caxton's "Morte d'Arthur" (1485) has a 
mention of this table, and there are various 
other historical references to it. Those who 
hold to the probability of its being King Ar- 
thur's veritable table, adduce such reasons as 
these. King Henry II rebuilt the palace at 
Winchester about 1150. He was one who 
loved the King Arthur legend, and wanted 
to add a new glory to this castle palace where 
King Alfred and King Canute had lived. Tra- 
dition says that he hunted up this relic of King 
Arthur and had it repaired for the palace ; this 
was in the twelfth century, when Robin Hood 
and his Merry Men were flourishing. It 
was referred to also in the history of Henry 
VI's time. Henry VII had a son born here, 
and he named him after the great hero Ar- 
thur. Henry VIII entertained the Emperor 

214 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

Charles V in this great castle, and during his 
reign there is a bill of repairs to this table still 
preserved in the royal archives. 

Sir William Wyndham Portal has carefully 
investigated all the evidences in the case and 
holds steadfastly to the belief that this table is 
a genuine product of the time of King Arthur 
and his knights and should be most sacredly 
cherished and guarded. He also is firm in the 
faith that Winchester was the Camelot of Kins; 
Arthur's day, the center of English chivalry 
and legends as well as of English history. 

Now in order to give you the fullest facts 
on this singular and important relic of the 
Arthurian days, the Lady and I made a spe- 
cial appeal to the present custodian of the 
Castle and the Great Hall, — the Lady smil- 
ing persuasively, — and he carefully wrote out 
for our pilgrimage the following account of 
this Round Table of King Arthur, from the 
special historical notes and unprinted chroni- 
cles of the castle, which he uses. He assures 
us that they are not yet to be had anywhere 
else. Do read them carefully, for these are 
his very words: 

"Tliis table is made from English oak, constructed 
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THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

in wedge-shaped sections, and measures 56^ feet in 
circumference and 18 feet in diameter. The age of 
this ancient relic is not given in history, but we 
know it was spoken of as being old in the thirteenth 
century. We certainly can associate this table with 
Sir Thomas Malory's works. Caxton's 'Morte 
d'Arthur' says it was made at Tintagel in Corn- 
wall by Merlin the wizard, and that he gave it to 
Uther Pendragon, father of Arthur. Pendragon 
gave it to Leodegrance, father of Guinevere, and 
Leodegrance gave it to Arthur and Guinevere when 
they were married at Camelot, and he always tells 
you that Camelot was afterward called Winchester. 

"There is therefore good grounds for those people 
who think that Malory had some foundation for 
writing his works to take the history of this table 
back 1400 years instead of TOO. It was, however, 
restored in the Tudor times. Thus you find the cen- 
tral decoration are the Tudor rose, and the twenty- 
four rays around are painted in the Tudor livery 
colors, white and green. 

"The table was taken down in 1874 while the wall 
behind it was repaired, and it shows how or on what 
it used to stand. There are twelve beams radiating 
from the center like the spokes of a cart wheel, and 
at the outer end of each beam is a mortice hole into 
which the legs used to go respectively, and it looks 
as though there had been a very much larger cen- 
tral support. The inscription round the roses is 
as follows : 'Thys is the rounde table of Kyng Ar- 
thur with XXIIII of hys namyd knyttes.' 

216 



WINCHESTER AND THE ROUND TABLE 

"On the top of the table as it now hangs is a 
painting of King Arthur, and on his left is the 'Seige 
perilous' occupied by Sir Galahad. This seat was 
so named because it was reserved for the knight who 
was destined to achieve the Holy Grail. This was 
Sir Galahad. 

"On the King's right was the 'Place de Judas,' 
occupied by Sir Modred, the most treacherous 
knight. 

"The names of knights in order as they appear 
on the Table, reading from the right as we are look- 
ing at it, are: Sir Galahad, of the Seige Perilous; 
Sir Launcelot du Lake, father of Sir Galahad; Sir 
Gawain, brother of Modred and Gareth; Sir Per- 
cival; Sir Lyonell; Sir Trystram de Lyonese (the 
lost land between Tintagel and Scilly Isles) ; Sir 
Gareth; Sir Bedivere, the knight who threw Excali- 
bur into the lake ; Sir Bleoberis ; Sir Lacote Male 
Tayle, who wore the coat of his father who was 
murdered, — thus he was known, as Male Tayle ; Sir 
Lucane; Sir Palomides, the Syrian knight; Sir La- 
morak of Wales ; Sir Bors de Ganys of Wales ; Sir 
Safir, brother of Palomides ; Sir Pelleas, husband of 
Nemur; Sir Kay, seneschal and foster-brother of 
King Arthur; Sir Ector de Marys; Sir Dagonet the 
Jester ; Sir Degore ; Sir Bruneur ; Sir Lj^byns 
Dyschoforus, the Disc Bearer; Sir Allynore; Sir Mo- 
dred the Traitor who slew his uncle King Arthur 
in the Vale of Avalon in 542 a.d. 

"John Hardyng, who was born In the year 1378, 
says of this Table: 'King Arthur's Round Table 

217 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

in Winchester began, and there it endeth, and there 
it hangeth yet.' 

"The above is a proof that the table was looked 
upon as being old even then. 

"In conclusion I must tell you it was shown by 
Henry VIII to Charles V of Germany in 1522 as 
one of the most interesting relics of the kingdom, 
hanging then as it does now on the wall of this 
Hall." 

Now whether these matters can ever be defi- 
nitely proved, it is yet j)leasant to thinlv of the 
possibility of King Arthur and his knights hav- 
ing gathered around this very Round Table, 
with the wise Merlin guiding affairs of state, 
with Sir Galahad, Sir Percival, Sir Tristram, 
and the other valiant knights and true at the 
festive board. It is an inspiring dream of the 
glory of early British chivalry. 



218 



XV 

GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND THE 
ISLE OF AVALON 

WHAT a day It was at old Glaston- 
bury Abbey, with legends that 
reached back almost to the time of 
Christ, with relics and remains from the lake 
village that existed there in prehistoric times, 
and with actual history that takes Glastonbury 
Abbey back to the earliest British chronicles, 
and makes it the oldest monument in England 
of the faith of the fathers. Tennyson sings of 
Glastonbury as the "Isle of Avalon," and in 
the ancient days so it was, — a group of isolated 
hills around which the river ran with a serpen- 
tine curve, making almost an island in the 
valley. 

The name Avalon is derived from the 
Welsh plural of "Affel," an apple, indicating 
an orchard-island. Tradition also gives it an- 
other Welsh name, indicating that the island 
lay among the glassy waters of a lake or an 
inland arm of the sea, where, according to 

219 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

strange stories, "ships sailed up from the 
channel land and the wide world beyond it to 
the ports that fringed the margin of the estu- 
ary." Certain it is that in prehistoric times 
there were lake village communities here dwell- 
ing in huts built upon piles. In the maps of 
the seventeenth century the district was 
marked "Home of the Belg^e," but in the most 
ancient Saxon times there was here a Saxon 
family or clan of the Glaestingis," and hence 
the name that has clung to the ancient site, 
Glastonbury, the hill fort of the Glastings. It 
was therefore a pilgrimage into the dawn of 
British history upon which we ventured at 
Glastonbury. 

The ideal way to have approached Glaston- 
bury would have been as pilgrims on foot. But 
we took a slow train, which traveled almost 
in the leisurely fashion of a pilgrim. As we 
came near, we saw the famous Glastonbury 
Tor or Tower high on its steep hill. It has a 
certain sinister and ominous look. It stands 
forbidding and weird in the midst of the beau- 
tiful rolling country and rich meadows and 
flowery gardens of the mystical land of Ava- 
lon ; and it may well tower up, gaunt upon its 
desolate hill, for it is the sad sentinel and 

220 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

remembrance of a ghastly day in November, 
1539, when a dark tragedy was enacted here 
and the last abbot of Glastonbury was mur- 
dered, and the wonder and glory of the life of 
the magnificent abbey was at an end. 

Careful historians are fairly agreed that the 
tradition of the founding of the abbey by Jo- 
seph of Arimathea and other disciples of Philip 
the Apostle is perfectly unprovable. But to 
many minds it is at the same time perfectly 
credible, — its greatest probability being in the 
uninterrupted tradition. A thousand years 
long was Glastonbury held in such veneration 
that it was called a second Rome. The mighty 
dead were brought here for burial from all 
parts of England and Europe, and even the 
soil was considered sacred, being taken away 
in quantities by the devout, even as the soil of 
Palestine. 

Tennyson in the "Idylls" tells of the sacred 
Glastonbury thorn, and of the Holy Grail that 
was deposited here as a most precious treasure. 
Do you recall the lines? 

"Tlie cup, the cup itself from which our Lord 
Drank at the last sad supper with his own. 
This, from the blessed land of Aromat — 
After the day of darkness, when the dead. 

221 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

Went wandering o'er Moriah — the good saint 
Arimathean Joseph, journeying brought 
To Glastonbury, where the winter thorn 
Blossoms at Christmas, mindful of our Lord. 
And there awhile it bode; and if a man 
Could touch or see it, he was heal'd at once. 
By faith, of all his ills. But then the times 
Grew to such evil that the holy cup 
Was caught away to heaven, and disappeared. 

"To whom the monk: 'From our old books I know 
That Joseph came of old to Glastonbury, 
And there the heathen prince, Arviragus, 
Gave him an isle of marsh whereon to build; 
And there he built with wattles from the marsh 
A little lonely church in days of yore.' " 

"What a queer old tree that is!" cried the 
Laddies, "with stickers all over it." They had 
discovered the Glastonbury thorn, the most 
famous tree in all England, the sacred tree 
that blossoms at Christmas time. This is the 
story of the tree : 

Good Joseph of Arimathea had gone forth 
with the Apostle Philip as a preacher of the 
new faith. He had first come to Gaul, as 
France was anciently called, and later was 
sent across the water to carry the gospel into 
Britain. He landed in Cornwall with eleven 
disciples and made his way northward. One 

222 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

Christmas morning they reached the isle of 
Avalon, a smihng group of orchard hills in the 
midst of the marshes of the river, and being 
weary they sat themselves down upon what is 
called to this day "Weary All Hill." The 
good saint struck his staff into the ground, a 
thorn staff which he had brought with him 
from the Holy Land, and lo, it sprouted and 
flowered, as did the pope's staff in the legend 
of Tannhauser. And the brethren accepted 
it as a sign that their wanderings were over. 
The heathen prince Arviragus gave them per- 
mission to stay and granted them twelve hides 
of land to build a church. They built them- 
selves huts in the side of the great Tor, that 
one may still see, and erected a wattled church, 
which was called later St. Mary's Chapel, and 
afterward St. Joseph's, in honor of the good 
saint of Arimathea, and still later it became 
the nucleus for the famous abbey, which now 
stands there in monumental ruins. Here the 
missionaries remained, guarding their special 
treasure which Joseph of Arimathea had 
brought with him, the chalice that was used at 
the last supper of our Lord, and was now 
called the Holy Grail. After the death of 
Joseph of Arimathea, tradition says it was 

223 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

buried with him, and from his grave there 
gushed forth a stream of healing water on the 
hill still called Chahce Hill. 

Its fame was known and its memory revered, 
and in the year 166, Pope Eleutherius, at the 
request of King Lucius, helped to restore the 
wattled chapel and to resuscitate the religious 
community of the pious brotherhood. In the 
fifth century, St. Patrick of Glastonbury 
established the first monks, making the church 
into an abbey. In 512, Gildas the historian 
was buried near the church, which had become 
a shrine for veneration. In 546 St. David 
built a new church near the old one. In 630 
St. Paulinus, Archbishop of York, covered in 
the wattled wood church and incased it with 
lead. It had now become a sacred relic. Such 
are the legends and facts of the oldest eccle- 
siastical foundation in England, which is so 
ancient and so sacred that it is often called 
"the English Jerusalem." 

As the old gardener showed us around the 
ruins, he lifted up a trap door at one point in 
the journey and proudly pointed to the old 
Roman foundations and the ancient tiles and 
mosaic pavement. These took us back, not to 
those earliest days of which we have been 

224 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

speaking, but to the great church that was built 
and endowed as a monastery about 688. Here 
we are upon sure ground, for the text of the 
charter, dated 704, still exists. The great 
church was built in honor of St. Peter and St. 
Paul. These are the immense foundations that 
are still partly to be seen, and thenceforward 
the history of the Abbey becomes a part of the 
great history of England. In the reign of 
King Edmund we get a picture of the Abbey 
that is striking. John Richard Green, the his- 
torian, writes vividly: 

"The king had spent the day in the chase. The 
red deer which he was pursuing dashed over Chedar 
CHifs, and his horse only checked itself on the brink 
of the ravine. While King Edmund in the bitter- 
ness of death was repenting of his injustice to Dun- 
stan he was at once summoned on the king's return. 
'Saddle your horses,' said Edmund, *and ride with 
me.' The royal train swept over the marshes to 
Dunstan's home, and greeting him with a kiss of 
peace the king seated him in the priestly chair, as 
Abbot of Glastonbury." 

This Dunstan, afterward called St. Dunstan, 
introduced the Benedictine rule, and Glaston- 
bury Abbey entered upon a golden period of 
political and literary activity. Its school was 

225 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

the most famous in England, and its head was 
the counselor of kings. 

"Haven't we done enough of the history?" 
remarked the Lady, as I still delved into the 
ancient historical tomes; "let us see more of the 
ruins themselves." 

They are magnificent ruins, much larger 
and finer than I had ever imagined. They 
show the outlines and in many cases the walls 
and arches of a most stately and noble church. 
We went down into the crypt of St. Mary's 
Chapel, and saw the Holy Well. This was 
discovered only in 1825. It had been choked 
up with rubbish and entirely forgotten. It is 
about two feet across and four feet deep, and 
is overhung and protected by an arch. It has 
a special flight of steps leading to it. In the 
same crypt where we saw the Holy Well, there 
were also discovered in the ancient days eight- 
een cofiins made of oak, two or three inches 
thick. On the right side of each skeleton was 
a rod of thorn. 

The beautiful Norman doorway of tliis 
chapel is a perfect delight in its proportions 
and architectural ornament. "Imagination 
cannot realize," says one chronicler, "how 
grand and beautiful must have been the view 

226 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

from St. Joseph's Chapel through its long- 
drawn fretted aisles up to the high altar, with 
its four corners symbolizing the Gospel to be 
spread through the four quarters of the world." 
William of Malmesbury wrote that there were 
so many saints buried at Glastonbury, "there 
was no space in the building that is free from 
their ashes. So much so, that the stone pave- 
ment and the sides of the altar itself above 
and below are crammed with the multitude of 
the relics. Rightly, therefore, it is called the 
heavenly sanctuary on earth. Of so large a 
number of saints is it the depository." 

Glastonbury was not only the earliest Chris- 
tian church in Great Britain, and one of the 
most glorious of the Benedictine monasteries, 
but the structure itself was the largest in the 
whole country, and in many ways the noblest. 
One describes it as "princely in its estate, 
princely in its revenues, with an annual in- 
come of about $175,000, princely in its benevo- 
lence and hospitality." There were about "a 
hundred monks in the monastery, with three 
hundred lay associates, many of whom were of 
gentle blood, and probably a thousand men 
were dependent on it for the maintenance of 
their families, connected in some way with the 

227 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

monastery and its farms." No poor ever came 
to its door and went away hungiy. It is re- 
corded that sometimes five hundred knights 
were entertained at one time. It supported 
a great number of students at several univer- 
sities. A large number of its men were con- 
stantly employed in its cloisters illuminating 
missals and breviaries, and transcribing not 
only works of theology and devotion, but of 
classical and general literature. The library 
was the greatest in all England, and when 
Leland visited it in the final days of the last 
abbot, he bears witness he was so overwhelmed 
with awe at the sight of such vast treasures of 
antiquity that for a time he dared not enter. 
At the time of the suppression of the mon- 
asteries, more than two hundred and fifty 
thousand missals, ordinals, antiphonals, and 
graduals were destroyed, and it is probable 
that a great many of the beautiful illu- 
minated manuscripts were those of the library 
of Glastonbury. 

An eminent architect, Mr. Ralph Adams 
Cram, who recently visited Glastonbury, says 
that parts of the ruins are so faultless in their 
proportion, so wonderful in style, so marvel- 
ous in workmanship, that to the architect they 

228 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

are maddening almost beyond endurance. He 
found the carvings of the original doorways 
of the chapel, now blackened and crumbling, 
"purely and exquisitely Gothic, fresh, crisp, 
full of the assurance and insight of perfectly 
competent artists." He found the workman- 
ship to be of the highest type of any period 
in England; that these craftsmen "glorified 
God not only through the beauty of art, but 
through faultless workmanship as well." 

To think that the labor of generations and 
the proudest records of English Gothic archi- 
tecture should be in a few weeks utterly shat- 
tered and destroyed, and the exquisite carv- 
ings, the tracery of chapel shrines and tombs, 
the broken statues, and wonderful glass from 
the colored windows hauled away to make a 
common road across the marshes! Sad days 
for old Glastonbury, sad days for other eccle- 
siastical glories, when the iconoclasts began 
their work. 

The destruction is often ascribed to Crom- 
well, but we remember that this fierce icono- 
clast was not Oliver Cromwell. In visiting 
the ruined abbeys and old churches of Eng- 
land, one is constantly told by the verger that 
such and such destruction was due to Crom- 

229 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

well. We must bear in mind, however, that 
there were two Cromwells, living about a hun- 
dred years apart, and we must not saddle the 
sins of one upon the other. The Puritan 
captain, Oliver Cromwell, has surely enough 
to answer for, as one of the iconoclasts of the 
Puritan Commonwealth, without having him 
constantly confused with Thomas Cromwell, 
who was the chief agent of Henry VIII in 
the destruction of the monasteries. 

This Thomas Cromwell was the confidential 
secretary of Cardinal Wolsey. Through his 
patron's influence he advanced rapidly, and 
compassed the ruin of bishops and statesmen; 
he was given the task by King Henry VIII 
of suppressing and destroying all the monas- 
teries of the realm. This he did with a great 
deal of cruelty and wanton destruction, so that 
to this day his name is mentioned with ex- 
ecration. The king afterward made him 
Earl of Essex, with an endowment of seven 
rich abbeys to support him, but he forfeited 
the king's favor by saddling him with an 
ugly wife, and it was not long after that he 
was brought to the block, with few to pity 
him. It is this Lord Thomas Cromwell who 
is so ofteii mentioned merely as Cromwell, 

230 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

sometimes Crumwell, who is oftentimes con- 
fused in the minds of both vergers and vis- 
itors with the great Oliver Cromwell, who 
came a hundred years later and was no rela- 
tion to this detested agent of Henry VIII. 

The Laddies loved to walk around the 
ruins of Glastonbury Abbey and trace out 
the outlines of the vast transepts and the im- 
mense nave of the abbey church of St. Peter 
and St. Paul. We were amazed at the mas- 
sive piers of the central tower, the beauty of 
the pointed windows of the choir, and the 
fragments of wonderfully rich carving here 
and there, which tell us of the glory and 
grandeur that has been. When King Henry 
II visited the abbey, it was already a pile of 
architectural wonders and magnificence, gor- 
geously ornamented and wonderfully finished, 
to serve as a memorial to Joseph of Arima- 
thea, the first Christian saint in England. We 
can well agree with one architectural critic 
who writes; 

"What manner of place this must have been when 
every stone was in its rightful position, when the 
carving was fresh from the hand of cunning work- 
men, when the ceihng of the mighty fane was deco- 
rated with gorgeous paintings, when nave and aisles 

231 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

were paved with smooth marble, and were trodden 
by devout worshipers, when every window was all 
glorious within with rich stained glass, when every 
niche held its image and every chapel its shrine; 
when the great choir was filled with music and when 
the sanctuary echoed the accents of fervent 
prayers, — then, — and enough remains to justify the 
assertion, the Abbey at Glastonbury was in its prime 
the richest and stateliest in the kingdom." 

Tennyson uses the chronicles of Geoffrey of 
Monmouth, who brings King Arthur into the 
history of the seventh century, and he men- 
tions in the "Idylls of the King" the place of 
King Arthur's burial as the Isle of Avalon. 
He also says that Queen Guinevere was buried 
here after her body was brought from Ames- 
bury, and that here they lie side by side under 
the great altar. 

Hundreds of other names of great ones are 
connected with Glastonbury Abbey, who have 
lived within its walls or are buried in its sa- 
cred soil, such as St. Dunstan, St. David, the 
Venerable Bede, King Coel, the father of St. 
Helena, King Edmund the Magnificent, King 
Edgar, King Edmund Ironsides, and other 
martyrs, confessors, virgins, bishops, abbots, 
kings, princes, and nobles innumerable. But 

232 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

the greatest names of all, — at least for us 
Pilgrims, — are those of King Arthur and 
Queen Guinevere. 

It was during the abbacy of Henry de 
Soliano in the year 1191 that the bodies of 
King Arthur and Queen Guinevere were 
found and removed to a position before the 
high altar, so the tradition says. And the 
tradition is so clear and circumstantial, so full 
of concise detail, that it seems perfectly vera- 
cious. "If it is false," says one critic, "it is a 
masterpiece of circumstantial evidence." The 
writer, Giraldus Cambrensis, who sets down 
the facts in the most matter-of-fact way, de- 
clares that he himself was an eyewitness to 
it all. He says, that between two mysterious 
pyramids beside the chapel of the Blessed Vir- 
gin, seven feet below the surface was found 
a large flat stone, on the underside of which 
was set a rude leaden cross, which on being 
removed revealed on its inner and unexposed 
surface, the roughly fashioned inscription, 
"Hie jacet sepultus inclytus Rex Arthurius in 
Insula Avalonia." Nine feet below this lay 
a huge coffin of hollowed oak, wherein were 
found two cavities, the larger containing a 
man's bones of enormous size, the skull bear- 

233 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

ing ten sword wounds; the smaller, the bones 
of a woman, and a great tress of golden hair 
that on exposure to the air crumbled into dust. 
The abbot and convent, receiving these re- 
mains with great joy, translated them to the 
great church, placing the king's body by it- 
self at the upper part of a noble tomb, and 
the queen at the feet in the choir before the 
high altar, where they rest in magnificent 
manner until this day. 

These relics were visited by King Edward 
I and Queen Eleanor in the year 1276, and 
were also seen by Leland in the sixteenth cen- 
tury. 

We stood at the high altar itself, or at 
least the site of the high altar, as it was point- 
ed out to us by the old gardener, and medi- 
tated for a moment on the good Joseph of 
Arimathea. Possibly we also mused, here 
rests just beneath us the imperial, molded 
form of Queen Guinevere and the sacred dust 
of the blameless King. Would that we might 
even now see on this spot that magnificent 
shrine before the high altar, which was placed 
here by King Edward I in 1278, when he 
personally directed the disposal of the re- 
mains of these famous personages. 

234 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

The abbey grounds cover many acres. The 
abbot's barn, a cruciform building of the four- 
teenth century, with symbols of the four evan- 
gelists in the gables, is still used to-day, hold- 
ing about one hundred and fifty tons of hay. 
The abbot's kitchen is a gem of medieval 
architecture. It stands in pitiful solitude in 
the middle of a meadow, the only relic re- 
maining of the great domestic buildings of 
the abbey. It is a silent witness, so vast and 
splendid is it, with such wonderful fireplaces 
and chimneys, that these old monks of the 
Middle Ages did not give themselves entirely 
to fasting and prayer. 

One or two specimens of splendid medieval 
architecture are also preserved in the near-by 
village, such as the George Hotel, which was 
originally the Pilgrim House, built by Abbot 
S el wood in the fifteenth century, for the use 
of pilgrims to the abbey; and the ancient Tri- 
bunal on High Street, probably the Abbey 
Court Room of the fifteenth century. Not 
far off is the Tor, the massive tower that re- 
mains from the ancient chapel of St. Michael. 
Here it was that the last Abbot of Glaston- 
bury, Richard Whiting, a scholar of the mon- 
astery and a doctor of divinity of Cambridge 

235 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

was fastened on a hurdle and drawn to the top 
of the Tor, and there put to death with two of 
his fellow-monks, John Thorne and Roger 
James. This brought the history of the abbey 
to an end. Its dissolution and destruction 
rapidly followed. This murder on the Tor is 
rightly considered one of the blackest pages in 
the English Reformation. 

Most interesting to us were the relics in the 
Glastonbury museum. We saw a pilgrim 
staff and leather bottle, a reliquary with the 
bone of St. Paulinus, Abbot Whiting's coat 
and watch and ring, the monk's grace cup, a 
few books from the abbey library, and the 
strangely carved Glastonbury chair. But per- 
haps the most interesting relics in the museum 
were those older than Glastonbury Abbey, — 
the archeological finds from the prehistoric 
British Lake Village of Glastonbury, and espe- 
cially the famous Glastonbury bronze bowl 
and the dug-out boat made from ancient Brit- 
ish oak, which has endured probably three or 
four thousand years. But the relic in all Glas- 
tonbury which was cherished most by us is one 
that the Laddies carried away in a little packet 
close to their hearts, — one given to us by the 
old gardener who has charge of the abbey 

236 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

grounds, — a slip with the buds upon it of the 
ancient Glastonbury thorn-tree, brought hither 
by Joseph of Arimathea and blooming, as they 
tell, in ancient days at every Christmas time. 
Over the gravestone of King Arthur at 
Glastonbury Abbey, according to legend, were 
found the words : 

Hie Jacet Arthurus 

Rex quondam Rexque futurus. 

This, as we Pilgrims deciphered it, meant: 
"Here lies Arthur, King that was, and King 
that is to be." Long did the belief persist 
among the people that King Arthur would 
some day come back to England and save and 
rule the people. Some legends said that he 
was taken to a happy island to be cured of his 
wound, and to wait until the world should need 
him most; some said that he was in a great 
underground chamber at Caerleon-on-Usk, 
with all his famous knights; while others held 
that he was still in an enchanted castle at 
Camelot. But the legends all agreed that he 
should come back. 

Has he not come back? Is not every sign 
of growing chivalry and nobility in the people 
the coming of Arthur? Has not the spirit of 

237 



THROUGH ENGLAND WITH TENNYSON 

King Arthur come into the hearts of count- 
less thousands? Is not the world growing 
wiser and sweeter and more just? Are not his 
noble and gracious ideals more and more pre- 
vailing? Slowly but surely the good time is 
coming for which King Arthur prayed and 
fought. King Arthur is not dead. He lives 
to-day in the hearts of the people more won- 
derfully than he ever did in the ancient days, 
and he is still "Rexque futurus," for he is still 
a high and noble ideal for the world. 

So in Tennyson's final Idyll, "The Passing 
of Arthur," the noble king speaks his last 
words from the barge of death : 

"The old order changeth, yielding place to new. 
And God fulfills himself in many ways. 
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world. 
I have lived my life, and that which I have done 
May He within himself make pure ! but thou 
If thou shouldst never see my face again. 
Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice 
Rise like a fountain for me night and day. 
For what are men better than sheep or goats 
That nourish a blind life within the brain. 
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
Both for themselves and those who call them friend? 
For so the whole round earth is every way 
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
But now farewell. I am going a long way 

238 



GLASTONBURY ABBEY AND AVALON 

With these thou seest — if indeed I go — 
For all my mind is clouded with a doubt — 
To the island-valley of Avilion; 
Where falls not hail, or rain, or any snow. 
Nor ever wind blows loudly; but it lies 
Deep-meadow'd, happy, fair with orchard lawns 
And bowery hollows crown'd with summer sea. 
Where I will heal me of my grievous wound . . . 

Long stood Sir Bedivere, amazed and groaned: 

'The King is gone.' 

And therewithal came on him the weird rhyme, 

'From the great deep to the great deep he goes . . . 

He passes to be king among the dead 

And after healing of his grievous wound 

He comes again — ' 

Then from the dawn it seem'd there came, but faint 

As from beyond the limit of the world. 

Like the last echo born of a great cry. 

Sounds, as if some fair city were one voice 

Around a king returning from his wars." 



239 



POSTSCRIPT 

THERE are many more poems of Ten- 
nyson which the preceding Pilgrimage 
illumined with new light for us, as we 
carried our well-loved volume of Tennyson 
with us through England, and read further 
than the poems, or parts of poems, which we 
have quoted in our story. Many of them were 
too long to quote, but you have them in your 
own volume. Read them again at your leisure, 
or perchance as you may make a similar jour- 
ney. Here is a list which I would suggest in 
connection with the special points of pilgrim- 
age described in the preceding chapters : 

I. Lincolnshire : Boadicea, The Northern 
Farmer (Old Style and New Style), 
The Village Wife, The May Queen, 
Lady Clara Vere de Vere, Audley 
Court, Locksley Hall. 
II. Somershy: Ode to Memory, The Brook, 
Mariana, The Miller's Daughter, 
The Owl, Sir John Franklin, O 
Darling Room. 
241 



POSTSCRIPT 

III. Louth: The Poet, The Poet's Song, 

The Blackbird, The Dying Swan, 
Oriana. 

IV. Cambridge: Timbuctoo, On Cambridge 

University, To Rev. F. D. Maurice. 

V. London: Will Waterproof's Lyrical 
Monologue, Ode on the Death of the 
Duke of Wellington. 

VI. Shiplake: The Letters, The Gardener's 
Daughter, The Princess, Dedication 
to Enoch Arden, Locksley Hall Six- 
ty Years After. 

VII. Clevedon: All of In Memoriam. 

VIII. Hawarden: Compromise (To Mr. 
Gladstone) , The Ancient Sage, Vast- 
ness. 

IX. Farringford: In the Garden at Swain- 
ton, The Princess, Maud, Sea 
Dreams, Ulysses, The Revenge. 

X. Aldworth: The Palace of Art, Charge 
of the Heavy Brigade, the dramas, 
especially Harold, Queen Mary, 
Becket. 

XL Tintagel: The Coming of Arthur, The 
Last Tournament. 

242 



POSTSCRIPT 

XII. Amesbury Abbey: St. Agnes' Eve, 
The Victim, Guinevere, Sir Lancelot 
and Guinevere. 

XIII. Camelot: Bugle Song, The Lady of 

Shalott, Morte d' Arthur. 

XIV. Winchester: The Round Table, Lance- 

lot and Elaine. 
XV. Glastonbury Abbey: The Holy Grail, 
The Passing of Arthur. 



243 



INDEX 



AuJWOHTH among the Surrey- 
Hills, 142; compared with 
Farringford, 144, 156; guests 
at, 157. 

Alum Bay, Isle of Wight, 117. 

Amesbury Abbey and Queen 
Guinevere, 176. 

Amesbury Abbey Church, 178. 

"Ancient Sage, The," 242. 

Antrobus, Lady, quoted on 
Amesbury Alibey, 176; on 
Stonehenge, 183. 

"Apostles, The," at Cambridge, 
53. 

Arnold, Dr. Thomas, of Rug- 
by, 112. 

Arthur's grave, at Camelford, 
196. 

Arthur, King, the legend of, 
190. 

"Audley Court," 241. 

Austen, Jane, memorial of, 
Winchester, 208. 

Avalon, the Isle of, 219; origin 
of name, 219. 

Baden-Powell, General, 41, 45. 

Bag Enderby, 19. 

Bayons Manor, 7. 

Beacon, the Tennyson, Isle of 

Wight, 137. 
Blackbird, The, 242. 
Blackdown, Haslemere, 143. 
"Boadicea," 6. 

Bonchurch, Isle of Wight, 116. 
Boston, old, on the Witham, 8. 
Boy Scouts, at Louth, 41. 
Bradley, Mrs., quoted, 129. 
"Break, break, break," where 

written, 9; quoted, 95, 



British lake village at Glaston- 
bury, 236. 

Brook, the, at Somersby, 28. 

"Brook, The," quoted, 29. 

Brooks, Phillips, visit of, to 
Farringford, 124. 

Brothers of Tennyson, 31. 

Bro\vning, Mrs., apprehension 
of, concerning Tennyson's 
bride, 85. 

Browning, Robert, Tennyson's 
friendship with, 72. 

Caerleon-ok-Usk, 165, 237. 

Cambridge and college days, 
51; Backs, 59; quoted, in "In 
Memoriam," 59 ; Tennyson's, 
after-visits to, 56; Univer- 
sity, poem on, 242. 

Camelford, 194. 

Camelot, 86, 153, 193, 211, 216; 
and Lyonesse, 187. 

Carisbrooke Castle, Isle of 
Wight, 114. 

Carlyles, tlie, Tennyson's visits 
to, 67; description of Mrs. 
Tennyson by, 85. 

"Charge of the Heavy Bri- 
gade," quoted, 144. 

Cheltenham, 64. 

Clevedon, the shrine of Arthur 
Hallam, 89; church, 96; 
Court, 9t, 95; "In Me- 
moriam," quoted, 96, 98-100. 

Cock Tavern, Fleet Street, 
London, 67. 

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, at 
Clevedon, 93. 

"Coming of Arthur, The," 
quoted, 173. 



245 



INDEX 



"Compromise," to Mr. Glad- 
stone, 242. 

Coniston, Lake, Tent Lodge at, 
85; diary, quoted, 85. 

Cram, Ralph Adams, the archi- 
tect, quoted, 228. 

Cromwell, Oliver, at Cam- 
bridge, 52; Lord Thomas, 
229-231. 

"Crossing the Bar," 150; 
quoted, 162. 

Crowland Abbey, 6. 

Death of Tennyson, 159. 
Dickens, Charles, quoted, 64. 
Dozemary Pool, 197-199. 
Dramas, the, 150. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, quot- 
ed, 64. 

"Enoch Arden," 131; dedica- 
tion to, quoted, 83. 

Farringford and the Isle of 
Wight, 111; Tennyson's home 
at, 119, 120-123. 

Father of Tennyson, 34. 

Fen-coiuitry, 8 

Fields, James T., at Farring- 
ford, 136; Mrs. Fields quoted, 
82. 

Fitzgerald, Edward, quoted, 11. 

"Flower in the Crannied Rock," 
quoted, 2. 

Franklin, Sir John, 15, 241. 

Freshwater, the bay, 117; town 
of. Isle of Wight, 118. 

Funeral of Tennyson, 159. 

"Gardener's Daughter, The," 
quoted, 3, 81, 

Gladstone, William E., 101. 

Glastonbury, ancient history of 
town of,*220; Abbey and the 
Isle of Avalon, 219; tradi- 
tions of, 221 ; thorn, 221, 222; 
Tor, 220, 235. 



Gosse, Professor Edmund, 

quoted, 12. 
Green, John Richard, quoted on 

Glastonbury, 225. 
"Guinevere," idyll of, quoted, 

185, 186. 



Hallam, ArthxtRj at Somersby, 
37; epitaph on, 97; tributes 
to, 89, 90; travels, 91; death, 
91. 

Haslemere village, 142, 143. 

Hawarden, the home of a life- 
long friend, 101. 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel,, and wife, 
descriptions of Tennyson by, 
81. 

"Higher Pantheism, The," quot- 
ed, 140. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, at 
Farringford, 127. 

"Holy Grail," 131, 134; quoted, 
221, 222. 

Holy Well, at Glastonbury, 226. 

Horncastle, 15, 47, 49. 

House of Lords, Tennyson in, 
London, 69. 

Howitt, William, quoted on 
Tintagel, 172-174. 

Humor of Tennyson, 17. 



"Idylls of the King," the 
theme 192. 

"I Made Them Lay Their 
Hands in Mine," quoted, 175. 

"In Memoriam," the poem, 92; 
dedicatory lines of, quoted, 
109, 110; quoted concerning 
Cambridge, 59 ; concerning 
Clevedon, 96, 98-100; con- 
cerning the larger hope, 74, 
75; quoted concerning Som- 
ersby, 38, 39. 

Inscription on King Arthur's 
grave-stone, 237. 



246 



INDEX 



"Isabel," describing Tennyson's 

mother, 35. 
Isle of Wight, 111. 

Joseph of Arijiathea, 231, 223. 

KiKG Alfred at Winchester, 

204, 205. 
King Arthur, historical or 

mythical, 190. 
King Arthur's Round Table, 

at Winchester, 200-217. 
King Canute, 205, 206. 
King Edward VI School, Louth, 

43, 45. 
King George and Queen Mary, 

200-204. 
Kingsley, Charles, at Farring- 

ford, 124. 
Knights of the Round Table, 

names of, 217. 

Lady Clara Verb de Vere, 49. 
"Lady of Shalott, The," 242. 
Lamb, Charles, quoted, 33. 
Larger hope, in "In Memo- 

riam," 74, 75. 
Laureateship, memorable year 

of, 81. 
Leland, the ancient historian, 

quoted, 228. 
"Letters, The," poem quoted, 

80. 
Lincoln Cathedral, 4. 
Lincolnshire and the Lincoln- 
shire fens, 1; dialect, 16; 

Doric speech, 48; legend and 

history of, 6; silhouettes, 9; 

worthies, 7. 
"Locksley Hall," 49, 50. 
"Locksley Hall Sixty Years 

After," 242. 
London, Tennyson's, 62. 
Louth and the old Grammar 

School, 40. 
Lyceum Theatre, London, 68. 
Lyonesse, the lost land of, 189, 



Mablethorpe, 10, 48. 
Maiden's Croft, at Farringford, 

131. 
Malory, Sir Thomas, quoted, 

179. 
"Mariana," 11, 241; quoted, 32. 
"Maud," 120, 125. 
Maurice, Rev. F. D., 57, 58, 

242. 
"May Queen, The," 49, 241. 
Merlin's Cave at Tintagel, 166. 
"Miller's Daughter, The," 19, 

55. 
Milton, John, at Cambridge, 52. 
Mitford, Miss, quoted, 84. 
Moated Grange, the reputed, 

31. 
More poems of the Pilgrim- 
age, 241. 
"Morte d'Arthur," quoted, 188. 
Mother of Tennyson, 35. 
Mount Desert, contrasted with 

Isle of Wight, 112. 

Natiokal Portrait Gallert, 
London ; Tennyson memo- 
rials at, 69. 

Needles, The, Isle of Wight, 
118. 

"Northern Farmer, New Style," 
16, 241. 

"Northern Farmer, Old Style," 
16, 241. 

"O Darling Room," quoted, 24, 

241. 
"Ode on the Death of the Duke 

of Wellington," quoted, 65. 
"Oriana," 243. 
Osborne House, Isle of Wight, 

113. 
"Owl, The," 24, 241. 
Oxford University, 51. 

"Palace of Art," 242. 
"Pantheism, The Higher," quot- 
ed, 140. 



247 



INDEX 



"Passing of Arthur, The," quot- 
ed, 199, 238, 239. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, quoted, 64. 

"Poems by Two Brothers," 46. 

"Poems Chiefly Lyrical," 55. 

"Poet, The," 242. 

Portal, Sir William Wyndham, 
investigations concerning the 
Round Table, 215. 

Portrait of Tennyson, 151, 152. 

"Princess, The," 135. 

Robertson, Rev. Frederick W., 

quoted, 92. 
Romsey Abbey, 180. 
Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 66. 
Round Table at Tintagel, 164, 

165. 
Ryde, Isle of Wight, 115. 

"St. Agnes' Eve," quoted, 177. 
St. Deiniel's Church, at Ha- 

warden, 104. 
St. Michael's Mount, 188, 189. 
Schooldays, T e n n y s o n' s, at 

Louth, 40-49. 
Sepulchre of King Arthur, at 

Glastonbury Abbey, 233. 
Shanklin Village, 116. 
Shelley's "Skylark," quoted, 18. 
Shiplake and the Wedding Day, 

76; the Church, 77, 78. 
"Silent Voices," quoted, 71. 
Smith, Captain John, of Vir- 
ginia, at Louth, 45. 
Somersby, the poet's birthplace, 

15; the rectory, 20; chur<"h, 

33; first study or den at, 24; 

Gothic dining hall at, 22, 23; 

in "In Memoriam," 38, 39. 
"Song, The Poet's," 342. 
Spalding, in Lincolnshire, 7. 
Spilsby, in Lincolnshire, 15. 
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 

quoted, 16. 
Stockworth Mill, 19. 
Stonehenge, 181-184. 



Swainton, and the poem of 

"The Princess," 135. 
"Swan, The Dying," 242. 
Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 

116. 



Taylor, Bayard, 136. 

Tealby, 6. 

"Tears, Idle Tears," 36. 

Tennyson, altogether English, 
13; his attitude toward Na- 
ture, 133, 134; his boyhood at 
Somersby, 30; brothers of, 
31 ; bust, by Garland, at 
Louth, 34; bust of, by Wool- 
ner at Cambridge, 56; his 
death, 159; his father, 34; 
favorite trees, 127; favorite 
walks and drives, 135, 136, 
158; his funeral, 159; his 
humor, 17; love of the sea, 
126, 127; his mother, 35; ori- 
gin of name, 6; portraits of, 
151, 152; records in phono- 
graph, 154; statue of, at 
Lincoln, 1 ; statue of, by 
Thorneycroft at Cambridge, 
57; tributes to his wife, 82, 
83, 85, 87; visits to Tintagel, 
171; the artist, 14; the seer, 
14; wedding, 76; working 
habits of, 126, 130, 132. 

Tennyson, Hallam, the present 
lord, 145, 146-153. 

Tennyson, the present Lady, 
145. 

Thackeray, William Makepeace, 
at Clevedon, 94. 

"There on the top of the down," 
quoted, 88. 

Thorold, Bishop, quoted con- 
cerning Winchester, 207. 

Timbuctoo, prize poem at Cam- 
bridge, 51. 

Tintagel, 153; and King Ar- 
thur, 163. 



248 



INDEX 



Totland Bay, Isle of Wight, 

117. 
Trinity College, Cambridge, 51, 

52, 57, 58. 
Twickenham, 65. 
"Two Voices, The," 33. 



"Vastness," 342. 

Ventnor, Isle of Wight, 115. 

"Village Wife, The," 16, 341. 



Walton, Izaak, memorial of, 
Winchester, 208. 

Watts, George Frederick, por- 
traits of Tennyson by, 69, 70. 

Weary-aU HiU, at Glastonbury, 
225. 



Wedding, Tennyson's, 78, 79, 

84. 
Welsh motto of Tennyson's, 

158. 
Wesleys, the, 7. 
Westgate Place, Louth, 41. 
Westminster Abbey and Tenny- 
son, 70; funeral, 70, 71, 161. 
Wight, Isle of, 111. 
William of Malmesbury, quoted, 

227. 
"Will Waterproofs Lyrical 

Monologue," quoted, 67. 
Winchester and King Arthur's 

Round Table, 200. 
Winchester Cathedral, 201. 
Windsor, as Camelot, 86. 
Working habits of Tennyson, 

126, 130, 132. 



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